APQC - www.apqc.org
APQC is a best practices organization that provides information and research on benchmarking, knowledge management, measurement, and process improvement to its approximately 40,000 members. APQC’s somewhat rare in the web world because its product is its content. Obviously, a robust and flexible content management framework is critical.
APQC launched a new site in Drupal, the culmination of 6 months of effort. Achieve Internet led the development, beginning with analysis and planning sessions in October. The major tasks were to migrate APQC’s content from the existing Interwoven CMS, perform the necessary Drupal configurations and customizations, address the various integration points, and tune for performance and scalability.
Site Functionality
In many ways, the functionality APQC desired is perfect for Drupal. They needed a platform that would allow them to:
- share and publish content in a variety of forms
- efficiently manage document workflow
- offer community-building features such as blogs user-created groups
- implement a ratings system and a forum
- sell content at different prices to different types of users
- handle content access permissions via a robust group management system
Although APQC is mainly a Microsoft shop, they wisely decided to reach outside into the open source world for their content management framework. Drupal’s permission system, Ubercart package, community-building features, and content workflow capabilities are perfect for what the organization wants to do with its web site. APQC’s rigorous approach to project management and development required that their vendor match their intensity. Achieve Internet is proud to have worked with APQC, and to have delivered a robust, integrated, and flexible solution on time.
Viacom – MTV and Paramount
Achieve Internet was originally invited to participate in both the MTV and Paramount projects as Drupal Architecture Experts. MTV had completed phase one of their project however they were experiencing Performance and Scaling issues. Achieve Internet completed a thorough analysis of the current code and the project roadmap. The conclusion, unfortunately, was the current developer did not follow Drupal Best Practices and the Drupal code needed to be re-engineered.
The Paramount project, Paramount.com, was in much better shape. First they were earlier in the process. Phase one had not been completed and the developer on that project had a great deal more experience and knowledge in the Drupal platform. Achieve Internet delivered an extensive analysis suggesting minimal enhancements to the Drupal Architecture.
Both projects incorporate Flash front-ends and Drupal CMS. MTV’s Virtual World project also had a proprietary ecommerce component that integrated tightly into the Virtual World experience. In the end the Paramount project succeeded and the MTV department was shut down.
Experian
As the leader in the credit score industry, Experian collects credit data on over 3 million U.S businesses. It goes without saying that they take Security seriously. As a result they regard training and technology as a priority. Given certain website challenges that Achieve Internet is restricted to discuss, the decision was made to add Open Source technology into the existing server environment. Unlike most organizations that order a server and download the appropriate LAMP stack software, Experian required a thorough training session before any code could be developed. Achieve Internet turned to a trusted partner and a leader in the industry, Zend, the PHP company. Zend gave an impressive four-day seminar covering everything from Linux to PHP. As a result the Experian team of 20 plus people were well prepared to add the LAMP stack and Drupal to their server environment. Achieve Internet contributed a full day of Drupal training as well as ongoing development and training services.
