How weKnow Streamlined Digital Operations for a Fortune-60 Company

A global fuel distribution company had been experiencing accelerated growth beyond their projections.

In fact, they had been growing faster than Apple for the previous 10 yrs. They had 2,500 locations and over 8,000 employees worldwide. The accelerated growth was unfortunately accompanied by some strain on the I.T operations pertaining to their Drupal websites. They came to weKnow for help enhancing their operations on over 42 Drupal websites.

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The Challenge

  • The client wanted to consolidate the 32 websites into one Drupal multi-site installation to be able to control the code base from one installation of Drupal. They had already initiated migration of some of the websites to the multi-site installation.

 

  • Upon further investigation, we determined that the requested multi-site setup was not going to offer the client the flexibility and independence needed by each website.

 

  • Another major roadblock was their in-house infrastructure, setting up developer environments was taking 4 -6 hours. Further, the authentication process on their local system complicated the development process by hindering deployment through a myriad of false errors.

What We Did

The solution we had to bring forward needed to solve two major issues: streamline development operations, and stable developer friendly infrastructure.

Fortunately, one of our closest partners, Pantheon, had the infrastructure requirements we were looking to implement. Their infrastructure solved the development environment issues, as well as scalable infrastructure for the websites. That was one problem solved!

We now shifted our focus to central administration of the websites, and what we recommended was using the Drupal Domain Access Module. This is a set of modules that combine to offer central administration of all websites within one Drupal installation. It also allowed for the websites to have different domain names.

overall project outcome?

  • 3X Faster development process

 

  • Easier administration of all 42 websites from one interface

 

  • More secure environment

 

  • Scalable infrastructure through Pantheon without in-house management overhead