Customer Testimonials

CommonSpot amplified the power of uPortal by enabling content to be easily managed—a capability uPortal lacks. With CommonSpot, we can easily create and customize MyU pages or ‘channels’ for massive productivity gains. What used to take a week to produce, we can now do in mere seconds. When you are developing hundreds of channels, that time savings really adds up.

We felt that CommonSpot’s inherent flexibility and ability to integrate with our existing applications made it the best solution to help us better organize website content and optimize user experiences on the site.

We engaged PaperThin’s Professional Services team to help us implement a new responsive website design and we’re thrilled with the outcome. The PaperThin services team is knowledgeable, efficient, and a pleasure to work with and we look forward to using them on future projects when we need the extra bandwidth. It was well worth the investment.

We explored adopting CommonSpot as the City of St. Louis CMS solution out of the need to consolidate 100+ stand alone ColdFusion applications into one cohesive, web-based platform.. What started as a pragmatic solution, became an excellent product choice and a deeply rewarding partnership with PaperThin and its skilled, professional, and service oriented staff. The initial implementation called for customization of CommonSpot to meet unique requirements to our project. With ongoing support from PaperThin we integrated a custom information architecture and taxonomy, later implemented a new design iteration that is responsive, five years into our partnership, we continue to create custom features that meet the needs of our public. There is no such thing as a perfect solutions, so when challenges arise, only a responsive and committed company see you through it. PaperThin is that company for us.

After six years with the product, I can tell you several reasons why CommonSpot remains our choice: 1) Community – PaperThin has a large number of colleges and universities (of various sizes) as customers. They understand the Higher Ed market. In addition, we have a voice in the development of the product.
2) Availability – From the first level support to the president, all of the staff at PaperThin are accessible. They want to meet our short-term and long-term needs. Also, their support and professional services staff are top notch. They are easy to work with, very responsive, and work quickly.
3) Usability –Their system makes it very easy to maintain web content. The developers are able to build templates and elements that take the heavy technical requirements out of maintaining a website. We have people with very limited computer skills maintaining web pages.
4) Customizability – My team has not found anything that CommonSpot cannot be customized to do. The elements and templates are infinitely configurable to your needs.

The City of Foster City has been a PaperThin customer for a very long time now. We hired its professional services team to upgrade CommonSpot to the latest version and implement a new website design for us, including the creation of custom features. Our new website is now up and running and we are thrilled with it. The services team was instrumental in making this happen. They are consummate professionals who I have enjoyed working with from day one, and I look forward to continuing that positive relationship going forward. A big thanks to the great team at PaperThin!

Advanced Developer training was excellent. PaperThin did a great job. It really opened my eyes as to what we could do with the product technically. Now I’m able to do the really fun stuff that I like to do with render handlers, JQuery, etc.

The product and the people who support the product at PaperThin have been very responsive to meeting our needs. We completed a major site re-design in about three weeks that went live with great success. That solid performance resulted in our decision to move to an unlimited license and roll out CommonSpot University-wide.

Having the ability to directly manage a taxonomy and change and expand the navigation as our site grows from hundreds to thousands of pages is critical. We're very pleased with the outcome of our efforts.

Through our partnership with PaperThin, we have provided our customers with the best content management solution (CMS) in the industry, CommonSpot. Selecting CommonSpot as the CMS of choice, and PaperThin as our partner means that our customers enjoy an easy to use, scalable, extremely powerful CMS; and a company that backs-up their product and provides unparalleled customer-support.

What was delivered exceeded our expectations across the board. We could not be happier with the new website, or with the level of service we got from the entire PaperThin team. From day one, the Professional Services team was responsive and helpful. But perhaps more important, the feedback from the community—as well as our web content editors—has been glowing. That is the true measure of success. I look forward to working with PaperThin for years to come.

St. Luke's had thousands of pages of content to migrate as a part of a Web initiative to unite seven sites (including websites and intranets) onto CommonSpot, yet our Web group was very understaffed. CommonSpot was so easy to use that we were able to hire untrained high school volunteers to migrate all of our content which saved the organization both time and money.

We built several custom administration tools using CommonSpot's application development framework. One application enabled us to deliver role specific content to users via our corporate intranet based on their computer login. The app dev framework was very easy to use. In fact, CommonSpot is very easy to use. 

As with all things on the Internet today, sharing is essential. Whether between students and friends, or faculty and staff, the new AU website utilizes CommonSpot to foster the AU community which is essential to bringing the entire campus together.

Featured Search in v10.0 is a fantastic tool. Site visitors see exactly what we want them to see in site search results increasing site search relevancy while eliminating the dreaded No Results page. It has definitely helped improve web experiences. Our content editors also love the drag and drop feature in v10.0, as well as the Image Gallery. It has made managing content and organizing images much more user friendly. There are a lot of different ways to organize and find images now on the fly. CommonSpot v10.0 was a big step forward in usability.

We love using CommonSpot. The system’s flexibility and customizability inspires our team to think about how we can use it to create new website features that will help the University meet its business goals. New development can be built quickly and with relative ease. With CommonSpot, the possibilities are endless.

As digital marketing itself becomes a multi-channel experience (website, social media, etc), CommonSpot has become essential to Seton Hall's success. We easily deployed a cutting edge analytics system across an enterprise-grade website, and were able to extend our brand beyond the shu.edu domain, rapidly integrating our site with current and emerging social media as they become indispensable components of our marketing mix.

CommonSpot is like Christmas for Web managers!

My team here at Vanderbilt has been quite pleased with how easy and versatile CommonSpot is to use. We were able to get key contributors throughout our school up and running quickly. Now they are able to update content on the website without relying on a 'Webmaster'. It's far more efficient.

Things have been going very smoothly. PaperThin’s help really played a big role in making the new website launch successful and an overall smarter process.

We chose CommonSpot for its flexibility and ease of use. CommonSpot offers us the flexibility needed to develop custom applications and pages on both our public website—Sharp.com—and our Intranet. Healthcare demands rapid development to meet the changing needs of our organization and the market. CommonSpot delivers and integrates with our Web systems. And with hundreds of content contributors, we needed something that everyone would understand right out of the box. Users have been up and running with brief video tutorials and little coaching. The system just makes sense for our end users and for our development team.

CommonSpot allows us to build brand awareness worldwide as well as to generate new leads by promoting IMD research and programs, two chief goals of the new website.

Our intranet had grown exponentially over a five or six year period. We were using the Ektron content management system and it just didn’t meet our requirements. We needed a WCM solution that would handle large site traffic demands, that was easily customizable, flexible, and that provided the tools Sharp needed to continue to further develop and expand the website with features such as multi-media, taxonomy, and blogs. CommonSpot fit the bill across the board and has been a great choice from day one.

CommonSpot offers Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) a fully customizable solution that will allow us to easily build our Web sites the way we want them to be while enforcing a unified design and consistent branding. In addition, CommonSpot will enable SCAD to increase productivity by empowering non-technical users campus-wide to publish content. This will help us to significantly improve the timeliness and relevance of content on the Web.

Fig Leaf Software has a holistic approach to providing our customers with solutions, which means we don’t sell on cost or cheapness, we sell on value. Our customers measure that value in terms of how well we enable them to enhance their own customers’ experience, which in turn helps them to do more business and service their own clients. This is exactly what we get from our partnership with PaperThin and their content management system, CommonSpot. The ability to enhance our customers’ experience of doing business and enhance the functionality that they deliver to their clientele.

We thought it would be an advantage to be in on the ground floor of the new release so we opted to be a Beta customer—or guinea pig if you prefer—for version 10.0. It was a great decision on our part. We got to take advantage of all of the new features in the upcoming release before they are released which we were really excited about, plus we had the opportunity to test the features, address problems, and give input. It was a win-win for us.

The American University website launch was successful because the university worked as a team—from the people that paid the bills, to the staff members that developed the code, to the PaperThin team, to the faculty members that learned how to create their own profiles. Together we created a Web 2.0 website with a focus on a great user experience.

Social media helps people take that next step from being aware of Abercrombie & Kent as a luxury travel brand to actually engaging with us. Using CommonSpot, we have tracking in place so we know what's working.

We downloaded the calendar app that was built in CommonSpot's application development framework and made it our own. It was a lot of fun to build. Working on our own we would never have gotten the calendar to look this good. We just don’t have the development time. Our marketing team are very happy campers.

CommonSpot has enabled non-technical users to manage MyU content, where before the number of contributors was limited due to insufficient skill sets. Time to published content has improved dramatically. This integration between Uportal and CommonSpot truly gives us the best of both worlds.

We knew CommonSpot met all of our feature and technical requirements, but ultimately, it needed to be something that was easy enough for our web authors to use. It became very clear through usability testing that, unlike some of its competitors, CommonSpot is a CMS built to be a CMS, and it excels at it.

CommonSpot allows the University to effectively communicate its disctinctives, accomplishments and mission to a broad scope audience. The scalability and ease of use of the CMS allows me to collaborate with multiple deans, department heads and content managers while ensuring that this message is consistent throughout. And as web trends and technologies evolve and advance over time, I can remain confident that CommonSpot will continue to be a major asset to us in the future.

Our content is being ranked higher than it's ever been before. Year to date, traffic from search engines is up 20%...thanks to CommonSpot.

PaperThin held a 30 minute demonstration for content contributors and wowed the group with the system’s ease of use and how quickly users could publish content. It was so wildly popular that everyone wanted to be a part of the pilot—the waiting list was huge.

CommonSpot gives our business stakeholders the ability to take control of content without impacting future development of the website. Essentially, it allows developers to be developers, designers to be designers, and business stakeholders to manage content, which makes everyone more productive.