How Drupal helped in launching an Enterprise Class Application

Here is a case study of how Drupal helped in implementing a customer portal for a major utility service provider in the US.

Utilizing Drupal's default content management and community building capabilities and extending it to customer needs helped deliver an Enterprise class Customer facing portal under aggressive timelines

Below is a summary of the key features of this customer portal mapped to the associated Drupal capability that was leveraged and enhanced.

1. Content Strategy related functional requirements

The need for different types of pages in the sitemap was broadly divided into Landing Pages, Individual Pages and Functional Pages and it was easily achieved by using out-of-the-box content modelling tools in Drupal like Content Types, Views and Call back functions.

The flexibility for the editor to create dynamic landing pages with variants in UI (Image and Text combinations, layout variants) was possible by extending the content type interface.

2. Support of Responsive Layout and Ensuring Accessibility compliance

The out-of-the-box base theme used, with inherent responsive capability made the UI turn around much faster and ensured best practices were adhered to.

Accessibility requirements were met by the APIs available to extend the theme and forms.

3. Comprehensive content publishing workflow

Using Drupal’s native content create/ edit and publish workflows, a comprehensive content management system with localized access was provided.

4. Content related controls

Media player, Telephone Field Controls were plugged in using readily available modules. Social Media content share controls and SEO Optimization was easily achieved using readily available Drupal’s modules.

5. Audience Categorization and Localization requirements

The general audience and the logged in audience that were categorized as Std/Non-Std/ Informational users were managed using the user types. Localization was supported to present

BUs context related information using the taxonomy module.

6. Uniform Navigation and Menu control

Using the built in menu module the navigation at various levels have been created and administered using interface in the admin.

7. Alerts

By extending an existing module (newsletter), the alert functionality was easily achieved

8. Overall ease of application maintenance

With an active community supporting Drupal, enhancements to modules, security updates are published periodically and these are applied to the Drupal code base.

9. Search of Content

Using a powerful search engine, that comes with a inbuilt integration module, comprehensive search of content was achieved.

10. Integration with backend Enterprise backend

Drupal allows the flexibility to easily integrate with various enterprise backend, thus allowing the complex existing business backend functionalities to co-exist with contemporary state of the art front end user in

ce capabilities of Drupal and thus leverage on the ease of use.

11. Security

Multi pronged security checks can be implemented with ease using Drupal. This includes, encryption of sensitive data using AES encryption was achieved using readily available modules and API, hack prevention by using Captcha, flood control.

12. Analytics

Google Analytics and Event tracking modules to provide extended analytics

13. High Performance and Scalable architecture

Support for integration of 3rd party plugins like Varnish and Memcache help facilitate fast delivery of content. Drupal also supports integrating with cloud components that help build scalable infrastructure.