Drupal Case Study: Open Voice Communications Giant Switchvox.com Moves to Drupal

Switchvox / Digium Client Profile

Digium is a computer telephony company that develops and supports Asterisk, a widely used open-source software platform that enables any computer to become a communications server. This type of server is quite powerful and can handle voicemail for multiple phone lines, forward calls, distribute multiple in-bound lines, and enable Voice-Over-IP (VOIP). Digium also sells and supports Switchvox telephony hardware products. Digium has thousands of customers, including the US Army, Google, and the University of Pennsylvania.
 
In late 2007, Switchvox was acquired by Digium, further solidifying a relationship that allows them to satisfy their customers’ telephony hardware and software needs.

Drupal Project Scope

By late 2010, the company was ready to upgrade part of www.Digium.com—the portion that sells Switchvox products. The new part of the site offers product information and support, including product demonstration videos. To meet the site requirements, Digium needed a robust CMS (content management system) that would enable multiple content editors, including technical knowledgebase writers and ecommerce administrators, to manage site content and processes.
 
To maintain consistency across the entire site and create a seamless user experience, the new portion of the site needed to fit seamlessly into the existing look and feel.
 
As an open source organization itself, it’s no surprise that Digium sought out an open source CMS, ultimately deciding on Drupal, a choice Switchvox supported because they use Drupal on their site. Digium contracted Achieve Internet to handle the site upgrade. In addition to Achieve’s expertise in Drupal, including multi-language capabilities and high-performance site searching, Digium took advantage of Achieve’s training services, which enabled the company to hone best practices for managing content on the Digium site.
 
As with all Enterprise Drupal project Achieve ran Digium through our proprietary Architecture and Planning sessions. The results of that face-to-face discovery session was Achieve Internet and Digium agreeing on these major aspects of the site:

• Drupal 7!
• Creating the foundation for multi-language support
• Solr Search, with facets on taxonomy terms
• A new user experience design
• Extensive leveraging of Panels (http://drupal.org/project/panels)
• Frequent use of images and videos

With the outline in place, Achieve implemented its Agile methodology, with a two week development cycle, weekly client check-ins, and periodic demos of functionality. The project progressed as planned and included Achieve providing on-site training to content editors. The site launched successfully on May 31, 2011.

Achieve Enterprise Drupal Services

Although no site of this size—with supporting two languages initially and several more to come, hundreds of panel nodes, and hundreds of support documents—is completely straightforward, the development was smooth. Digium was quite budget conscious, and communications between Digium and Achieve were clear, leading Achieve Project Manager Sharen Gerchman to say it was a joy to work on the project. “They were some of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with,” Gerchman says.

 Achieve Internet Architecture Expertise

The project required approximately 30% of Achieve’s time be devoted to project management, focused primarily on technical guidance, process development, and assisting Digium with requirements definition and technical decision-making. Achieve helped Digium implement a server architecture that is appropriate for the site, which includes caching software Varnish (http://www.varnish-cache.org/about) and Solr servers. Achieve designed the production server architecture, as well as the development environment, including staging servers, to ensure that the main Switchvox.com site, including the new Digium site, serves current and future needs.
 

Video Management in Drupal

One of the site-building challenges related to the use of video. Digium offers a good deal of video support, some of which is stored on local servers and some of which is on Youtube. Achieve developers worked through one technical video issue by creating a new wrapper that integrated the FlowPlayer media player with the Media module so that the Media module could detect and switch to the correct rendering based on the source of the video.

Training

After developing enough of the site and deploying a staging site on the new server so Digium could start entering real content for the new site, Achieve visited Digium’s offices in March 2011 to conduct Drupal training for the content editors and managers. The session included instruction on the following:

• What content editors are and aren’t allowed to do in Drupal
• Creating a simple page
• Creating a Support document
• Creating a Feature content page
  • Creating Panels
  • Pulling in existing nodes
  • Using the WYSIWYG editor
• Creating a Book and its pages

The Digium site is somewhat complicated, and both the site design and Drupal were new to most content editors, so slides with callouts played a key role in creating effective instruction.
 

 
Content editors at Digium are able to use a Drupal WYSIWIG editor (http://drupal.org/project/ckeditor), and received instruction on how to use it:
 

 
The site’s heavy use of Panels required that content editors become familiar with the way pages are structured and how to enter their content: 

A questions and suggestions “parking lot” was also created during the training session so all open questions and issues could be resolved in follow-up sessions and discussions.
 
Digium then used the training document as the foundation for their own extensive internal process and training manuals.
 
Follow-up training sessions were conducted for newly-developed functionality. These were given either as separate sessions or incorporated into routine Agile project functionality demos. Additional training instructions were also given in a less structured way, including in posts to the project collaboration tool (BaseCamp http://basecamphq.com/).

Looking Ahead

In the Digium engagement, Achieve Internet combined its Drupal knowledge with architecture expertise, deep server knowledge, thorough training and documentation, and solid project management to deliver an effective web solution.
 
Looking ahead, Digium has plans to upgrade the rest of its site to Drupal. Digium also runs asterisk.org, a substantially customized Drupal 6 site, which it plans to upgrade to Drupal 7.