What to Expect in the Client & Industry Track at DrupalCon Europe 2021

Having a digital platform that can accentuate your institutions’ strategic initiatives is pivotal to remain competitive, relevant, and connected with multiple audiences. Drupal’s exceptional CMS framework and ease of use lets users curate and manage content in one place. It also ensures advanced compatibility and accessibility to all platforms from mobile devices to information kiosks.

At DrupalCon Europe, the Client & Industry track focuses on digital transformation in companies, and what role Drupal plays in this. We are excited to present different itineraries for the upcoming conference the week of October 4. Whether you are a business leader, agency owner, project manager, or product owner, join some of these sessions to gain some useful insights on our key themes.

Itinerary: Drupal Distributions

Using and managing Drupal distributions, whether they are open source or customized for your company, is a highlighted track theme this year. We kick off the topic on Monday morning with a panel discussion on Drupal Distributions - common challenges and solutions. Several distribution maintainers who have been meeting up since DrupalCon Europe 2020 will share some of the key learnings from the year and look ahead to how Drupal core can better support Drupal distributions in the future.

On Monday afternoon, join in on a deep dive into specific Drupal distributions for media and publishing in the session Exploring Top Media & Publishing Drupal Distributions.

On Tuesday, check out how one team creates and manages a customized distribution for a large scientific organization in the session Survival kit for CERN's organic webscape: Kubernetes and a community of Makers. 

Finally, on Thursday we end this itinerary with a case study on managing a custom Drupal distribution for a large global organization in the lightning talk The LightNest Starter Kit: Managing a Drupal Distribution for a Global Organization.

Itinerary: Government & Education

Today, Drupal is the most pervasive content management system in the government and education industries. Given the prominence Drupal has gained in these sectors especially, here are some sessions that we have lined up in this track to help your enterprise enhance its usefulness and modernize your web. 

On Tuesday, the session An ambitious digital experience platform for the future of Australia's government will showcase the use of Drupal in building a forward-thinking digital experience project for a leading Australian government agency. It will also demonstrate how this leading-edge platform aims to impact the government’s digital future.

At last year’s DrupalCon, the new LocalGov Drupal, a distribution used by 12 councils in the United Kingdom, was showcased. The team is back on Wednesday’s talk Why UK councils chose LocalGov Drupal (and didn't) to discuss their activities in proactively gathering user feedback to make iterations and enhance the distribution’s effectiveness. They will also share the challenges they are facing in having more councils adopt their solution. 

On Thursday, the spotlight is on Drupal as a preferred choice to build modern university websites across the globe. However, there are still some higher education sites that are poorly designed and not fully exploiting the potential of Drupal. In the session Drupal for Universities: current state and perspectives, the presenters will first give a comprehensive survey of how Drupal is used in universities across Europe and then move on to see what could be done by simply using Drupal the right way.

Itinerary: Ecommerce

Drupal can play a significant role in eCommerce, whether it is coupled with another solution or using Drupal’s own open-source eCommerce software Drupal Commerce. The sessions in this track provide case studies on both approaches.

In Tuesday’s talk The unique challenges of launching B2B stores on Drupal Commerce, the presenters will explore three distinct areas when planning and launching a Drupal Commerce Business-to-Business store: 1) B2B stores living alongside a current B2C E-commerce website, 2) content, marketing and strategy for B2B stores, and 3) unique technical challenges compared to a regular B2C website. Decision makers in the e-commerce industry and agencies implementing e-commerce solutions will learn about processes surrounding B2B projects and where to find modules, content and resources about B2B solutions on Drupal Commerce.

On Thursday, we present a case study on the decoupled approach in the session Building a large scale decoupled E-commerce application using Drupal, SAP Commerce Cloud and React. One of the largest food retailers online in Europe built a decoupled shop connecting e-commerce APIs for product information to headless Drupal for loading marketing content. The team will give an overview of the architecture of the website and shop integration, and will highlight the most important features of large-scale shops such as very large shopping carts, customer individual pricing, heterogeneous API infrastructure, native App with full offline support and more.

Itinerary: Governance

Web governance is the process of maintaining and managing an online presence in an organized way. It includes processes, policies, and procedures that help the digital team stay focused on the business goals.

In Monday’s session Focus on projects that matter; Use governance to free your team from endless site maintenance, find out how implementing smart leadership, best practices, and community-focused decisions allowed Washington University to put in place a system of governance, enabling them to deliver a solution for thousands of websites. 

Competing priorities is a key challenge that is addressed by a solid governance plan. In the lightning talk  The hierarchy of needs of high performing teams held on Wednesday, see how using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a metaphor can help teams organize these competing priorities by building on one another.

Itinerary: UX and Editor Experience Strategy

Deciding on the most appropriate and scalable editorial framework for a company’s CMS and supporting a seamless user experience are critical elements of a website business strategy. In this itinerary, the sessions touch on several important topics including Drupal editorial frameworks, content architecture, accessibility, and scalability.

For companies deciding on which editorial framework to use, check out the talk on Monday on Paragraphs, Gutenberg, CKEditor, WYSIWYG or Layout Builder, or all of them? which will explore how content editing evolved in the past in Drupal and then takes a look into the future with the role of the layout builder and more. 

To create a successful digital product, a planning of the information architecture and the user experience both for frontend and backend should create a full picture. In Thursday’s session The Business Value of Design - Tale of Two Projects, the presenters will explore why having a well planned content architecture is necessary, and how a company can save money on excellent and seamless UX in the end. 

Also on Thursday, the talk Making Accessibility More Approachable: Comprehension Over Checkboxes, Accessibility is an important part of meaningful user experience, but is usually treated as an extra step to just check off. the presenters will focus on why accessibility needs to be truly baked into your internal project processes and how you bring your program to full maturity.

Want to accelerate site creation? Then later on Thursday take a peek at the session SiteBuilder: A Brand Website in Less Than 2 Hours. See a case study will on how one company is scaling up their Drupal distribution through the creation of a wizard that spins off Drupal 9 instances based on selected brand style guides, modules, profiles, themes and content, and then generates them on a hosting platform as an MVP or final site.

Itinerary: Digital Experiences for Enterprises

The increasingly competitive market landscape has put businesses under tremendous pressure to deliver modern and engaging customer experiences across different touchpoints and channels.  However, enterprises need to understand that hardly maintaining a website won’t do any good. They need an entire digital ecosystem to engage their users, shape their buying decisions, and instill brand loyalty in them.

Drupal offers the right tools to build enterprise-grade digital experiences. The release of version 9 especially has given organizations more freedom and flexibility to use any custom front-end technology or use it as a full-fledged digital experience platform optimized for security and accessibility. Learn more about how to deliver seamless digital experiences through the sessions lined up in this track.

A multisite solution is a perfect solution for enterprises looking to resolve issues like brand inconsistencies while managing multiple websites across different geographies, lack of security and compliance, poor user experience and ineffective editorial workflows. Wednesday’s session How to successfully launch a multi-website platform for a leading pharmaceutical company in only 3 months will give you a sneak peek into some of the specific challenges that compelled the Schwabe team to move to a multisite solution, how they implemented the solution in such a short period, what benefits they observed post the solution implementation, and some more useful insights.

Then check out the following session on the same day, How to future proof customer experiences powered by Drupal.  With customers becoming more digital savvy, they expect brands to become consistent in the way they deliver them experiences across multiple platforms. The presenters aim to demonstrate how these needs are met by the Digital Experience Platform (DXP) which has transformed businesses by enhancing their customer experience. Real-world examples of tangible business outcomes will be showcased and discussed in this session.

The final session in this itinerary, Learn how we increase website engagement by 304% for a leading American utility, will showcase how SoCalGas leveraged Drupal and Acquia solutions and witnessed an 18% increase in new users, a 70% drop in bounce rate, a 304% increase in average session durations, and a lot more in their quest of building a scalable, future-ready solution that can deliver seamless customer experiences.

Create your own itinerary now to ensure you get the maximum benefit from the knowledge and insight of the many experts who are presenting sessions at this year's DrupalCon Europe.

See you at DrupalCon!