The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is the world's largest association serving the needs of the HR industry. With more than 240 chapters in over 140 countries worldwide, SHRM represents a total membership that exceeds 250,000 human resource professionals.
Each SHRM chapter oversees its own site which acts as a local hub of SHRM activity, providing news, industry updates, and event and conference announcements, as well as a complete member directory. Site updates are deployed by SHRM headquarters, while administration is handled by local chapter directors, who may or may not have any experience with website management.
Keeping Updates Manageabale
It was clear that without a networked approach, performing maintenance and updates on 240 websites would quickly become a logistical nightmare. Leveraging Drupal's multi-site capabilities, we crafted a site configuration to keep maintenance as undemanding as possible.
Each chapter site uses a single code base, but separate databases and files directories, meaning that while module and Drupal core updates need only be deployed once, each site has the flexibility to manage divergent content, users and settings.
SHRM Administration
Drupal made it easy to create a tailor-made administration panel that helps administrators jump straight to the most important tasks while keeping the techie stuff safely out of the way.
Command-line Fu
The Drupal shell utility Drush was instrumental in keeping maintenance and deployment times down, giving us the power to automate updates or install modules to all sites with a single command.
Focused Services
- Brand Discovery
- Usability Analysis
- Intelligent Keyword Selection
- Demographic Research
- Interaction Design
- Visual Design
- Content Management
- Custom Software
- Newsletter Campagin
- Kiosk Design
"It was a pleasure to work with the team at Saforian not only for the knowledge they offered and the professional service they provided but for their friendly attitude as well. I look forward to the opportunity to work with the Saforian team again in future projects.."Shelly Quinn
Merging Old and New
Data migration was at once the most challenging and interesting aspect of this project. The old chapter sites ran on IIS/ASP/MSSQL, and each site was associated with anywhere from dozens to hundreds of members, files and disparate content types. After a several-weeks-long investigation into the best transfer process, we developed a series of tools and procedures to carefully relocate and reorganize the data.
Working with batches of 5 chapter websites at a time, we first ran custom scripts to move production data and files into a Drupal 6/MySQL system hosted on a migration server. Once any migration errors were fixed, code was placed in open source version control system Subversion, and the chapter site was transferred from a migration server to a staging system. The new site was cleaned up using Drupal, and finally transferred to its home on the production system, where site data underwent a thorough review from front-end and back-end users.
MSSQL and MS Access data was scrubbed and inserted into MySQL using a custom-built Drupal module, which could be run via the Drupal admin panel or the command line. The module imported HTML pages from the previous system and jettisoned superfluous tags, maintained the integrity of user profile data during transfer, and slotted survey results from the old system into a Drupal Webform-readable format.
Pitfalls of a Proprietary System
The original SHRM chapter site network was run on a proprietary CMS created with IIS and ASP under Windows. Expensive, clunky and difficult for newly-minted SHRM chapter webmasters to use, only a select few were able to successfully navigate the system well enough to add or modify content on their local chapter site.
Seeing the need for a unified, accessible, and easily extensible solution, SHRM approached Saforian to revamp the chapter site network.
Notable Contributed Modules
- Backup and Migrate
- Calendar
- CKeditor and CKfinder
- Private
- Scheduler