4 Webmasters and the Drupal Shining Star

Falling oil prices, budget cuts and hiring freezes are challenges many institutions have to deal with today. The University of the West Indies [UWI] is no different. When the campus web teams of the UWI spanning over three main geographical locations in Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago along with our fourth virtual campus, Open Campus, servicing some 17 contributing countries, were presented with the strategic objective to assist in making the UWI globally competitive, we realized we had a challenge on our hands.

With already stretched resources and little or no budget we knew that choosing the right strategy along with the right tool would be the deciding factor in our success. How therefore could we consolidate four campus websites running varying technologies from classic ASP, dotNET and PHP and each with it’s own content management solution into a solution that is efficient, required little training and development and at the same time cost effective.

One of the major obstacles to overcome would also be to find a solution that could handle multiple sites, using varying themes and each having a feature set of its own.

Other issues such as content sharing among campuses, integrated user authentication, custom theme development, content management workflows and end user retraining, made finding a solution to handle all of this seem like an impossible task.

There was however light at the end of the tunnel all thanks to Drupal. Follow us on our journey as well describe how Drupal has helped to solve our major problems and how we plan to use it in 2015/2016 to help achieve that strategic objective.