As one of the nation's premier private research universities, Lehigh is made up of five distinguished colleges representing over 150 years of tradition.
It also has a network of over 150 websites with a small, internal team to manage them. Coupled with an absence of standardization, this heavy maintenance load prohibited the team from working on new initiatives that were important for the University.
Our Support & Maintenance department augmented their internal team so they could move toward more standard implementations and accelerate their development velocity.
A strategic partnership that gets results
The Lehigh development team had plans to standardize their large network of websites to more efficiently serve the needs of the university. But implementing the future is difficult when you have so much work to do in the present.
To expand capacity, we provided project management and development expertise to plan, scope, and complete custom development tasks. Each process allowed for open communication with Lehigh.
After an ongoing collaboration of review and testing, custom modules were officially handed to Lehigh for use on their network of sites. This enabled Lehigh to focus on urgent tasks they were responsible for while continuing to make progress on their future-oriented, strategic vision.
Create once - use everywhere
Many websites in the Lehigh network needed to show content from other Lehigh websites, and they needed access to that content quickly. No central repo of this content existed because various editors across various sites needed to retain their autonomy when creating content.
We worked with Lehigh to give administrators control of content imports from the UI. By installing a single module, any Lehigh website can import content from other Lehigh websites and have its own unique list of data sources that can be changed at any time. No extra custom development is needed.
This provided a huge chunk of functionality to potentially dozens of websites and can be easily rolled out once more websites are ready. Future rollouts will not increase the load of the Lehigh team’s maintenance responsibilities.
We always enjoy working with Lullabot to supplement our own team with their expertise and experience.
Project credits
The following people contributed to the success of this project.
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David Burns
VP of Extended Support
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Cathy Theys
Support Team Manager
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Hawkeye Tenderwolf
Former Senior Developer at Lullabot
Services
We provided the following kinds of services to help this project succeed.
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Drupal Development
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Support & Maintenance
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Technical Project Management