OTC Pharmaceutical Company
Multisite Migration: A Streamlined Solution
Introduction
Symetris collaborated with a Pharmaceutical Company that develops, manufactures, markets, distributes, and sells over the counter (OTC) health and personal care products in North America, Australia, and internationally. Its diverse portfolio of health and wellness products includes consumer brands dedicated to women’s health, pediatric care, digestive care, and more.
Facing an aging technology, they needed to migrate 32 brand websites from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, with an emphasis on maintaining consistent quality and user experience across all sites while minimizing operational stress.
In partnership with the client’s marketing team, Symetris had to build a technological structure that could accommodate varied new designs, SEO best practices and health care compliance.
32 Websites Migrated in Record Time
Complete the migration of 32 unique brand sites from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 within only 14 months.
Robust, future-friendly backend structure
Create a streamlined, multisite architecture with consistent yet customizable elements for each brand.
Empowered client
Maintenance of the websites after migration needed to be ensured by the client's technical team. Our team needed to train them to become autonomous regarding content management and technical updates.
One template to rule them all, but 32 sub themes to accommodate
Allowing a great variation in design, while maintaining a single code base and a shared set of modules. The multisite structure needed to accommodate 32 sub themes across the same type of content and a uniform backend experience.
High Velocity constraints
Delivering one website every two weeks required extreme coordination within the team supported by proactive partnership. The whole development process, from initial kickoff to development, QA, demo and deployment, needed to happen 2 times per month.
Multiple acceptation gates for each website
For each deliverable, the following acceptation steps needed to be passed in order to progress: Backend technical test cases, Front end integration test cases, Content entry validation, SEO best practices and industry compliance. Those tests needed to be conducted by people in different companies, requiring a high quality standard by everyone involved.
“Our project manager is extremely friendly and calm. He does well under pressure and never gets frazzled. As a result, we developed a great relationship with him.”
— Bechara Jaoudeh, CEO, Philly Marketing Labs
Websites migrated in record time in Drupal 8. The future-proof structure later allowed to migrate again to Drupal 9 in a fraction of the time.
Weeks of development per site after initial multisite structure.
Easy maintenance and evolution
The solid technological structure and frequent deployment allowed to more easily maintain the growing list of live websites, and made the addition of new features seamless across all brands.