Drupal at ASU - Drupalcon 2010

Drupal at ASU

Jeff Beemanjeff.beeman@asu.edu

@asudrupal | @doogiemac

Who we are

Web consulting services

What we do

Shared Web Hosting

Contracted dev

Core services

Core services

Drupal + ASU Webauth

ASU (Zen) theme

Enterprise Drupal

Enterprise Drupal

Support & consulting

Community

How’d we get here?

asu.edu in 2006• Over 1 million pages; ~500,000 hits per day

• Fractured online services; Decentralized IT

• Little collaboration and cooperation

• All kinds of CMSs (or lack of CMS) and languages

• Lack of single university-wide vision for user experience

• No uniform brand

• No universal navigation

2006: Balkanization

2010: Drupalized

Biggest obstacle: Politics

Politics

• Territorial site ownership

• No incentive to unify

• No supported tools

• No community

The approachThe velvet glove

a.k.a.Carrot vs. stick

Make Drupal so tasty people can’t resist moving to it.

Tactic #1:Tools

• Standard platform (Drupal + modules)• Standard environment (shared hosting)• Standard branding (theme)

Tactic #2:Community

• Web Community• ASU Drupal Users Group• Drupal Office Hours• Training: Lullabot / ASU• Support & Outreach

Today

• Buy-in from key players• Web hosting environment: 25 servers

w/ ~100 sites each• Core sites in Drupal: libraries, news,

student services, etc.

• Enterprise environment• Consistent look; global templates;

Drupal sites use central theme• Consistency in apps (modules)• Improved repurposing of content

Hosting environments

• Shared hosting

• High-performance

• Enterprise

• Cloud

Future

Challenges

• Clean up the mess we’ve made

• Address growing pains

• Cloud / hosted services

• Tools dedicated to Drupal hosting (i.e. Aegir)

• Data: Usage statistics

Challenges

• Change is slow and difficult

• Institutional perception

• Prove Drupal as legitimate

• Focus support efforts

• Training

• Mobile

Positive outlook

• Despite the challenges, we’re in a great position.