Sector(s)

Team Members

alanburke, asirjacques, bedlam, vulcanr, John Albin Wilkins, layalk, emily_mclaughlin

Project Team

Annertech is one of Europe's leading open-source digital agencies. Founded in 2008, we have grown to become not just the "go to" Drupal experts in Ireland but right across the UK & Europe, working with a range of clients in both the private and public sectors.

Our mission is to help companies to embrace open-source technology to deliver ambitious digital experiences for their customers. Our philosophy is to never hoard our knowledge, but share it – with clients, partners and the open-source community.

Our clients include: Glanbia, Dublin City Council, National Gallery of Ireland, and Haringey Council.

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

Approximately 10 patches to Drupal core and contrib modules were tested and are in use on the site. Each of those helps bring Drupal forwards as a more stable and useful platform. 

Orange, a large multinational French telecommunications company, with operations in 26 countries and close to 140,000 employees worldwide. With such a large presence, ensuring brand consistency across all markets can be a challenging task for any company.

Recognising the importance of maintaining a coherent and consistent brand image, Orange launched brand.orange.com. This website serves as a platform to provide various users with the necessary tools to effectively communicate the Orange story while ensuring brand integrity is maintained.

One of the main objectives of the Orange Brand site is to showcase essential elements of the brand, such as its history, logos, and guidelines, to a wider audience that goes beyond just those directly involved in brand management. Additionally, the website features achievements of the brand, including news updates, iconic milestones, and successful ad campaigns.

In addition to its external audience, the Orange Brand site also caters to the needs of internal users. It acts as a central repository where all Orange employees and external partners can access different types of content (editorial) and assets (files like photos, videos, and guidelines). These resources are shared by internal brand management experts within the Orange Group from various locations around the globe.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome)

Challenges

Behind the Orange Brand site lies a complex network of digital assets and their external management system, including various application programming interfaces that need to seamlessly integrate with the Drupal CMS to provide a user-friendly experience for a diverse range of users.

The project faced several challenges, including:

  • Integration with the third-party Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, MasterMedia, where all of Orange’s digital assets are stored and managed. The client's requirements pushed DAM’s API limits to their limit, forming one of the major challenges on the project.
  • Leveraging the power and flexibility of Drupal's Layout Builder and extending it to enable precise access control while at the same time adhering to the Orange Design system guidelines.
  • Coordinating multiple third-party APIs to work harmoniously with Drupal as the orchestrating layer.
  • Managing multiple layers of access control both within Drupal and the external asset management system while still ensuring effectiveness and user-friendliness.
  • Enhancing the site's performance by addressing significant performance issues suffered by the previous search system implementation against the DAM API.

Our approach

To address these challenges, we developed a custom React front-end for the DAM utilising their third-party API, while still utilising Drupal's user management system to maintain access control across the digital assets.

This approach offered several key benefits, including:

  • Centralised management of user access levels and permissions across different business areas within a single system.
  • Facilitation of access for external users to both the Brand site and the assets in the digital asset system using the website as an intermediary.
  • Optimisation of the performance by enabling direct integration between users and the DAM, thereby reducing the server capacity needed to deliver assets.

To ensure we delivered a user-friendly method of creating and editing content to streamline guidance and communication across the organisation, we integrated their existing design system with Layout Builder.

By using the Group module, we were also able to support communities within Orange. This enabled us to provide a personalised experience at both the page level and component level for individual users, along with tailored navigation experiences based on the groups or communities they were a member of..

We also implemented a seamless single sign-on experience for Orange users, as well as integrating with their marketing platform to ensure user details are kept up to date on an ongoing basis.

Results

The new website successfully provides seamless, fine-grained and layered access to over 12,000 assets in the DAM, with 100% of assets served directly from the DAM to the users.

We also removed a full server layer, which was previously required to serve the DAM assets, thereby improving the performance.

Approximately 35,000 users were migrated, while the new bespoke user management and approval system, enables any user within Orange to invite and manage external users on the system - all the while ensuring that access to the assets is tightly controlled.

Testimonial

"We’re delighted to have chosen Drupal and Annertech, and we’re confident that the system they've put in place will serve as a solid foundation for the ambitious plans we have for the platform. The website has made an immediate impact, and we can't wait to see what the future holds."

– Barbara Pollara: Head of the Orange Brand site

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Why Drupal was chosen

Despite its importance, the Brand Orange site faced a number of technical challenges, including issues related to performance and scalability, and an outdated content management system (CMS). To address these challenges, a decision was made to redevelop the site using Drupal. The goal was to create a more collaborative, decentralised, fast, and flexible tool for the organisation..

Brand Orange’s new website is shown on a laptop, phone and tablet

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

The Group module was a key extension used on the site, and enabled us to create the community functionality on the site.

The extra Layout Builder modules provided extra functionality and customisability to us when implementing the editor user interface.