This is a guest post by Mathew Lowry from Intrasoft International. We suggested him to write this post as a preparation for a BoF session his colleague will be organizing at DrupalCon Portland. If you are working on a Drupal platform for government or for a bigger organization that wants to standardize on Drupal as a communication platform for a series of its departments, and if you are attending Drupalcon Portland, come and join us to discuss best practices and lessons learned.
The European Commission recently launched a pilot Multisite Drupal7 Platform. Intrasoft Labs is organising a BofSession at DrupalCon Portland 2013 to explore the issues surrounding transforming Multisite Platforms into massively multilingual corporate CMS.
The EC launched a pilot Drupal7 Multisite Platform last year, seeing its first site (Digital Agenda) go live last October. More are to follow, but this remains a pilot project - the EC’s current corporate CMS is Documentum, with other sites and applications built using Coldfusion and Java.
The EC makes a lot of demands on its CMS. For example:
- There are 20,000 people working across dozens of Departments, Agencies and other offices, in 27 countries;
- Together they generate content ranging from laws (applying to 500 million people) to research project reports (which may be read by less than 500). Plus news, videos, brochures ...
- Their audiences are similarly diverse, ranging from those who don’t understand what the EU does or why, to specialists in fields ranging from international relations to nanotechnology research and gender equality;
- Multilingualism is extreme: some EC pages are maintained in over 20 languages;
- While much of the content is stored as HTML and XML files, there are dozens of online repositories, built using different technologies and managed by different people in different departments;
- Some content has a shelf-life measured in years, while in some cases the EC would like to react online in minutes;
- Governance is complex, with different parts of the EC managing their web presence and repositories in different ways;
- The increasing use of interactivity and social media is not making this situation any simpler.
The pilot Drupal7 Multisite Platform was launched to explore what contribution, if any, Drupal could play. As a Multisite Platform, however, it creates an ‘archipelago’ of stand-alone websites, while the EC needs a CMS capable of:
- managing content across the entire web presence seamlessly;
- allowing content sharing and cross-links between departments, as well as very rapid page and menu creation;
- closely integrated with a variety of repositories and translation engines;
- sophisticated workflow;
- supporting internal communications and coordination;
- integrated with and supporting the use of social media.
Intrasoft Labs will be represented at DrupalCon 2013 by Tamas Kugler, who helped build and launch Digital Agenda, the first website on the EC’s Multisite Platform. If you have anything to share, or would like to learn more, contact him or add a comment below, and catch up with him in Portland.
