Connecting Drupal and Enterprise Systems for a better UX on the web
In a world where content is king, knights are webmasters and drupal is the everlasting spirit that breathes within each knight. Each move must be strategic to deliver the best UX and form part of the content strategy plan if we are to be victorious in the best of website rivalries.
Content is what distinguishes a good website from a great one and having a strategy to support this is equally important. Every organization knows that content is the best way to share information about their products and services. The challenge faced however is that web teams do not create or own the content they preside over. Instead, they rely on the organization to provide content and most importantly keep it up-to-date. In many instances, this additional responsibility to an already overwhelmed employee often results in little or no updating of web content.
As such, organizations face a new challenge of keeping information related to the core business functions updated. Not everyone has the luxury of hiring specific web content editors and as such, web teams are tasked with the responsibility of finding creative solution to problems like this.
For our regionally distributed organization, The University of The West Indies, we found that the information already existed in our Enterprise systems, just not in a web friendly format. We therefore needed to find a way to bridge the gap between the data stored on our Enterprise systems and the web. This is where Drupal came to the rescue. This session will show how we built a Drupal module that can consume data from our two of our enterprise systems, namely, Banner by Ellucian ERP and Oracle PeopleSoft Human Capital Management, and display it in a user friendly manner on the web.
The simplicity and beauty of this solution is the utilization of drupal to connect to an authoritative data sources which already has staff dedicated to content maintenance, which indirectly drives the UX. It also underscores the importance of content ownership in one’s content strategy.
The ultimate goal of this is to develop a system that connects all of our Campus Drupal installs (located over different geographic locations) and make all academic programs, all job vacancies and all telephone contacts easily available on each campus website .
Our session is intended for the beginner to intermediate Drupal user and will not be too technical. At the end attendees would get a better appreciation of the flexibility of Drupal and it’s ability to integrate with Enterprise systems. Drupal may be shaped into that missing piece for the solution to work.