Sector(s)
A global meeting place for EHS and Quality professionals, where they can easily network, learn and collaborate with their peers. A collaborative space for them to share their knowledge, gain easy access to valuable resources, ask questions, and engage with leading experts in the industry.
A thriving community platform that was already providing a unique user experience and was supporting a whole variety of content types: market researches, webinars, infographics, whitepapers, etc.
And yet, there was still room for improvement and Intelex chose the OPTASY team to help them further improve both their content workflow and their membership system.
About the project
All our tasks for this project were centered around 2 main goals:
- to improve the community platform's load times
- to optimize the membership system
Since our client is constantly looking to improve the user experience provided on this platform and since speed has a strong impact on the overall UX, we worked toward making the whole caching mechanism more efficient.
Also, we focused on integrating (and, in some cases transitioning from) legacy platforms.
As for the membership system optimization, it included 2 main steps:
- creating 2 new sections: “Groups” and Companies”
- setting up a membership system
Special Technical Requirements
Integrating the membership platform with specific legacy platforms — SalesForce, ServiceNow, Pardot — has been one of the most "daunting" requirements on our list.
It was followed closely by that of integrating it with Custom Windows Azure API, which would turn Drupal into a centralized system. And by the challenge of synchronizing SalesForce/Pardot account with Drupal 7.
Back to topMain Challenges and Solutions
There have been 2 main challenges that we had to overcome during this project:
- integrating MS Azure into Drupal 7; in this respect, we had to connect the Drupal-powered website with an Axure Data Hub in order to sync all the modifications made to the content: editing, removing, creating and adding new pieces
- ... this way, whenever the Azure Hub detects a content update, it automatically retrieves that specific piece of content from Drupal 7 using a custom created REST Endpoint
- integrating SalesForce, ServiceNow company and user sync with Drupal 7 Content and User entities
Why Drupal was chosen
There have been quite a few strong reasons for choosing Drupal to power this community platform:
- it's ideally scalable, which aligned perfectly with our client's strategy to boost member engagement and to further grow the Intelex online community
- it's easily maintainable and that becomes particularly important when you have a complex network of members (both Intelex clients and “just” professionals in this niche) sharing and accessing content regularly
- it's highly reputed for its robust security; again, of a particular importance on a platform that hosts lots of member accounts (and implicitly lots of user data) and valuable, curated content; needless to add that our client was responsible for preserving the integrity of both the members' data and of their shared content
- its feature flexibility
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Organic Groups: enabled us to set up several different groups (e.g. the “Companies” group), each one with its specific users and content that those group users could access
Services: enabled us to create REST endpoints for external sources to use when retrieving or embedding new content
AmazonS3: enabled us to store our files on AWS buckets
Webform: enabled up to create multiple webforms integrated with the Pardot, the automated marketing platform that helps our client to keep track of fillouts, user engagement, social interactions, pageviews, etc.
Tools Used
Project management and team collaboration: Atlassian Jira and the Microsoft Teams app.
Web Development: Composer, AcquiaCloud, Behat, Drush, PHP Code Sniffer, VSC.
Back to topProject Results
In terms of content workflow and the user experience of all those professionals sharing content on the Intelex Community, things have been greatly simplified. Not to mention that content can now be stored both on the Drupal website and the MS Azure hub.
As for the membership system, it now better structured, into several different groups, each one with its own small community of users and group-specific content. All while featuring legacy platform integrations like SalesForce, ServiceNow, and Pardot.
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