Pronovix wins 2 awards for our work for Oxford University's Said Business School

We were looking forward to the award ceremony at DrupalCon Austin with high hopes, as all three of our sites got selected as finalists from more than 100 nominees. We were already very proud of our projects and team back then, but the award ceremony exceeded all our expectations: We didn’t only win, we won two awards in different categories! All our finalists and winners were sites for Saïd Business School (SBS), the business school of the University of Oxford. We’ll now introduce all three projects in more detail.

Saïd Business School public website

This is the new public website of SBS, that won the 2014 Acquia Partner Site of the Year Award in the Higher Education category.

Site design was delivered by One Ltd., and we were responsible for front- and back-end development. Our goal was to build an easy to use system that allows editors to maintain content easily, and present content professionally and consistently without administrator support. We were excited to hear from the client that the end result is very different from the websites of the school’s competitors. The flexible site structure we developed can grow with the School, and is adaptable to suit different business needs. Let’s see some of the main features of the site from a technology perspective:

• The site integrates with the school’s infrastructure, as their intranet and other sites are also built on Drupal. A profile sync mechanism synchronizes profiles from the intranet to the public website.
• We added advanced search with Solr, and social integration with customizable Twitter feed blocks.
• We built a structure that supports single-sourcing: Drupal offers a wide variety of data fields that can be later re-used for different content types.
• Organic Groups were used to set permissions for different groups of editors.
• Workflow was used to manage the editorial process.

My SBS: Saïd Business School intranet

This is an intranet site for the school, it won the 2014 Acquia Partner Site of the Year Award in the Internal Community Site category.

The goal of the project was to replace the existing intranet (iSBS) of the Saïd Business School and to provide a central location to manage profile information (MySBS). Drupal was the perfect choice for the client:

• As several of their sites are also built on Drupal, training costs could be greatly reduced, as the site management and editorial UX is common.
• The school uses Shibboleth for authentication across its infrastructure, and the website needed to integrate in this sense as well. Since Single Sign-On was also a requirement, we looked at the Shibboleth authentication Drupal module, and it made the integration effortless.
• The Services module provided a very easy tool for sharing data between Drupal sites of the school.

Of course no project goes without challenges. One of the most visible features was a customizable dashboard. It was obvious that this area would be heavily used by everyone, as it provided users with the navigation both inside the Intranet site, and towards other University services. Users had to be able to rearrange, add and delete items, without having to think about “saving” their changes to make the experience really seamless. Solutions like this are pretty much native in other frameworks, but required quite some custom development from our part. Luckily we don’t have to live without these features for long, as Backbone.js is integrated into Drupal 8. Another interesting functionality that we had to design and implement was the ability for the intranet site to provide a centralized system for managing user profiles, that is used by several other services in the School’s infrastructure. To tackle this problem the Services module provided a great foundation, we extended it with a few resources where needed.

Saïd Business School’s Global Opportunities and Threats Oxford (GOTO) website

The Saïd Business School’s Global Opportunities and Threats Oxford (GOTO) website is an online platform for problem-solving, analysis and debate concerning some of the biggest global issues the world is facing today. It was a finalist for the 2014 Acquia Partner Site of the Year Award in the External Community Site category.

Although this site didn’t make it to number one in its category, we were very proud to see it selected as a finalist. We wanted the site to live up to the noble cause it stand for, so we made sure the technology we used will serve its goal well:

• We developed an advanced front-end with responsive design.
• We added social network like features like system notifications about certain events and private messaging between site users and/or groups.
• We introduced some basic gamification elements: user activity on the site is visualized as an energy gauge. The measurement is relative to a user’s peers.
• We enhanced the search experience by providing a special tag cloud widget that works in tandem with other search elements.

We are proud to have been a part of launching an innovative online community that connects students with experts and alumni in the discussion of global challenges. All three projects were a great example of the collaboration between different Drupal shops and creative agencies, with Acquia preparing and managing projects, One Ltd. providing outstanding design and Pronovix developing the back- and front-end. It feels truly great to be appreciated by the community, and we will work even harder to contribute back to it as much as we can. It is very rewarding to get this kind of feedback for our work in the Higher Ed community: not only did our university project won two amazing awards, WalkHub, the project we've been contributing to the Drupal community is also getting a lot of good feedback from the Higher Ed community - where training and onboarding are really big and important problems. If you’d like to learn more about these projects or WalkHub, just send us a message and we’ll get back to you!