Digital systems for higher education

Modernize the systems students and staff rely on without losing the information inside them.

Sonoma Solutions helps colleges, universities, and individual departments move beyond legacy websites and databases, preserve institutional records, and improve accessibility across web pages and documents. Each engagement is scoped around the systems, formats, users, and verification requirements actually involved.

Discuss a higher-education project View the SRJC archive

Recent work includes 23,760 preserved SRJC course-version records and a working UC Berkeley document-remediation demonstration.

Three connected areas of work

These services can stand alone or be combined when a platform change also creates accessibility and data-preservation work.

Accessible websites and platform modernization

New sites, focused rebuilds, content inventories, and migrations from unsupported or difficult-to-maintain content management systems. Accessibility is treated as a design, development, content, and testing requirement throughout the engagement, not as a widget added after launch.

  • Legacy-site and content inventory
  • Target-platform and migration plan
  • Accessible templates and component implementation
  • Redirect, content, integration, and launch verification

Document accessibility

Our current automated workflow is built and tested for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. It can be paired with named validation tools, documented human review, and specialist quality assurance. Word, PowerPoint, and spreadsheet remediation can be scoped separately because each format requires its own native tools and checks.

  • Document inventory and prioritization
  • PDF structure and accessibility remediation
  • Machine-checkable validation record
  • Human review and specialist escalation when included in scope

Course and institutional data preservation

Legacy-system data extraction, normalization, record reconciliation, archival, and migration preparation. We preserve the source material, produce structured exports, document field mappings, and verify record counts before data is handed to a new curriculum, student-information, or institutional system.

  • Source-system and record inventory
  • Structured extraction and normalization
  • Source-document archive and reconciliation report
  • Migration-ready exports and target-field mapping

Higher-education case study

23,760 course records preserved outside a legacy portal

Santa Rosa Junior College course outlines were available through a legacy ASP.NET WebForms system with no application programming interface or bulk export. We built a custom extraction layer, normalized 23,760 course-version records across 2,382 course families, and downloaded all 23,760 identified source PDFs spanning Fall 1981 through Fall 2025. The resulting archive is structured for research, long-term preservation, and migration planning.

Read the SRJC case study

A migration is more than moving files

The exact sequence changes by system, but the controls remain consistent: define the source of truth, preserve it, transform it deliberately, and verify the result.

  1. Inventory the system

    Identify content types, records, documents, integrations, owners, dependencies, accessibility risks, and the fields that cannot be lost.

  2. Build a representative pilot

    Test extraction, transformation, accessible presentation, and verification on a sample that includes the difficult cases before committing to the full volume.

  3. Implement with checkpoints

    Process the agreed scope while retaining source files, logs, exceptions, and record counts that make the work reviewable.

  4. Verify and hand off

    Reconcile totals, test key user paths, document unresolved items, and provide the files, mappings, and operating notes the institution needs next.

Accessibility is part of the system, not a separate finish line

For web work, we define the applicable Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) target and the testing depth before implementation. For document work, automated results are recorded separately from human checks. Passing one tool is evidence about the tests it ran, not a blanket accessibility or legal-compliance guarantee.

Sonoma Solutions has partnered with The Accessibility Guy for specialist manual quality assurance and escalation support when that review is included in an engagement. The specialist scope, availability, and responsibility are confirmed for each project.

Review the accessibility service Inspect the Berkeley document demonstration

What we will establish before quoting

  • Whether the project is an upgrade, rebuild, content migration, data migration, archive, or a combination
  • Which source systems and file formats are in scope, and whether usable exports or interfaces exist
  • Which accessibility standard, tests, assistive technologies, and human-review steps apply
  • Who controls the source and target systems, procurement, approvals, and production deployment
  • What evidence will support acceptance, including counts, logs, test results, exceptions, and handoff documentation

Common questions

Start with the system that is hardest to leave behind

Tell us what is changing, where the information lives now, and what cannot be lost. We will tell you what we would inspect first and whether a bounded pilot makes sense.

Discuss the project