Pharma Leader’s Drupal Migration for Enhanced Security & Flexibility 

Background 

Our client was utilizing an EPI server and made the decision to migrate to Drupal, a technology that was more secure, extensible, and flexible, with a large community support. After researching various options, the end client chose Drupal as it met all of these requirements. 

Client 

The client is the leading pharmaceutical company in Japan. It is consistently at the forefront of the industry, driving innovation and setting high standards for others to follow.

Challenges

The Symphony Solutions team faced several challenges when starting a project with our client. One of the main challenges was ensuring that the client’s editorial experience was consistent across all projects. The client wanted to maintain the same structure for all projects and to make it easy for non-technical people to use.

Another challenge was finding a way to easily add new content components to all projects as needed. This required finding a solution that would allow for flexibility in the content structure. 

Lastly, the projects had a large amount of content that needed to be migrated and the team had to find a solution to handle this. They had to find a way for the efficient Drupal migration of the content and also have the capability to remigrate any content that had been changed. 

Solution

The Symphony Solutions team was engaged in a project to help our client migrate to Drupal, a modern and secure web technology. Here’s what the team accomplished: 

• Built a Distribution using Thunder (Drupal with many tools for content publications), and added some custom tuning and modules to improve the work of paragraphs. This allowed non-technical people to easily create pages with text, images, banners, headers, footers, and slideshows, and made it possible to use the same distribution for all projects and control components per project through config split. 

• Correctly configured config split per project, making it easy to build new components for page structure, such as new fancy slideshows, and enabling them with one click on any other project. 

• Leveraged Drupal’s built-in support for migrating content from any source (database of any type, JSON, XML, CSV) by creating a structure of plugins to migrate all different types of content to Drupal paragraphs and vault. 

Result

Symphony Solutions was engaged to help our client, who had no prior experience with Drupal, migrate to the platform for its superior security and flexibility. Our team was able to achieve several key business outcomes for the client, including: 

• A consistent fundamental structure across all projects, making it easy for the client’s team to support and maintain the system. 

• A streamlined admin interface and admin theme with consistent functionality, allowing for optimization of the client’s editors and publishers team. 

• Single Sign-On (SSO) across all projects, allowing registered users to easily log in to all projects with one set of credentials. 

• A global media library for easy upload and reuse of images, videos, and documents across different parts of the site. 

• Reusable complex page components that can be easily added to different pages by non-technical editors, such as image galleries, slideshows, multicolumn tips, tabs, etc. 

• Centralized hosting with 24/7 support and uptime of 99.9%, as well as a UI for automatic deployment and fast security upload deployment. 

• Financial savings due to the centralized system with a unified base of components and technologies, which is simpler to support and maintain.