How a multi-billon dollar company leveraged Drupal to change the corporate landscape

Fluke Corporation is a multi-billion dollar high tech manufacturer of test and measurement equipment used in nearly every corner of the planet.   Our teams challenge was to migrate the corporation's existing websites (60+) off of old aging CMS platforms and onto Drupal.  The existing websites are running on a technology platform that is no longer supported by anyone in the world and the sites fail frequently resulting in lost revenues.    The challenge was how to quickly move all 60 sites and to build a scalable platform that will carry the corporation into the next decade on a relatively limited budget with a very small web development team.    Add to that the challenges of being a company with operations and customers that span countries around the world and the requirement to support nearly sixty different languages.  Add to all of that the desire for every site to be ready for ecommerce so that we can sell direct. 

While the mountain before us seemed to be daunting, the solution framework that we have constructed pushes Drupal to the limits.  We decided to separate content from presentation, assets from content, and people from content and websites.   The resulting architecture includes:

1. A common Drupal distribution that is used to build all corporate websites, using Pantheon's platform capabilities for building sites off of a common distribution.
2. A Drupal instance we call the Enterprise Content Management System, where all content for all websites is authored, managed, an published (content lives centrally, not on individual websites).  The ECM allows us to share content across all of our sites, as well as import content well in advance of building a site as the content repository is separate from the website itself.
3. A Drupal instance we call the Digital Asset Management (DAM) System, where all images, documents, software, manuals, and video are stored.   No file based assets are stored locally on any website, they are all served from the DAM.
4. A Drupal instance that we call the Enterprise Profile Management (EPM) System, where all customer (site visitor) related information resides (e.g., consolidated order information across all of our websites), as well as the ability to authenticate external users using SAML for our Partner Portal Drupal site.
5. Multisite Solr using OpenSolr where all of our content across all sites is indexed into a single index that is shared across all the sites.  This index is not only used for search but it is also the source of all content that is rendered on various websites, including the implementation of language fall-back in Solr.   Solr is also our integration layer for pulling and publishing content from and to external systems.

The result of our effort, an architecture that allows us to:

1. Scale massively by distributing the ECM, DAM, EPM, and Solr across clusters of servers, leveraging Pantheon's platform.
2. Serve our broad customer base in their native languages (entity translation).
3. Easily integrate external systems by leveraging off-the-shelf Solr interfaces to common systems.
4. Quickly spin up new sites using our corporate distribution.

This session describes:

1. Why we created the various components (Corporate Distribution, ECM, DAM, EPM, Solr)
2. How we architected and built the components of our solution
3. The challenges we faced and the lessons we learned
4. The skills we needed
5. Long term benefits of our "plug-and-play" architecture
6. Our future plans of moving to Angular on the front end.

About the Presenter

Todd Tomlinson is Fluke's Enterprise Drupal Architect.  He has been building Drupal sites for the past 13 years and has logged more than 32,000 hours of hands on Drupal architecting, development, and site building.   He is well known for his 7 books on Drupal, including Enterprise Drupal 8 Development (Apress - 2017), Pro Drupal 7 Development (Apress),  Beginning Drupal 8 (Apress), Beginning Drupal 7 (Apress), Drupal 8 Theming (Packt), Beginning Backdrop (Apress), Migrating from Drupal to Backdrop (Apress).   He is a frequent contributor to the Drupal Watchdog Magazine and was on the product advisory board for Acquia.