Dedicated Resource & Collaboration Portal With Decoupled Drupal and ReactJS

The Project

The client works with several consulting projects with a dedicated Customer Service Team (CST) handling each project. While each CST works with a single customer, all of them need to access the same organizational resources, tools, and firm assets. They also need the ability to communicate and collaborate across teams for better flow of knowledge and operational best practices. 

To make this happen, the client tasked Srijan with building a dedicated CST portal. The goals of the project were:

• Creating a one-stop-shop for all CSTs to communicate, collaborate and navigate through firm assets and resources
• Support current and future CSTs with an end-to-end integrated portal that gives them secure access to firm tools while guaranteeing access controls to maintain confidentiality and compliance

The Solution

The Srijan team got to work with the goal of creating a portal that would help the CSTs organize itself in terms of cross-engagement collaboration, LOP support, leveraging material from former engagements and network with other CST members. 

The final CST portal solution was designed to deliver the following:

• A singular source to access a variety of content assets to build client relations. Materials include shareable articles, overview of firm publications, trigger alert section, calendars with relevant industry events/firm events.
• Fine grained users access to relevant firm tools and solutions that help to understand clients, clients competitors and industry perform better.
• The ability to craft new analytical scenarios for specific customers, focusing on special assumptions (like a technological breakdown). These can be promoted to community scenarios, and de facto become available to other CSTs for use on their projects if needed.

The team also delivered system education trainings to CSTs as and when a new feature is launched and engages in regular follow-ups to drive adoption.

Srijan is continuously working on future iterations and updating the present system with any new updates related to software and infrastructure, keeping security as main concern and integrations based on CST feedback.

The Technology

The solution can be simply understood as a sum of two parts:

The Frontend

The portal frontend is built with ReactJS and pulls information from databases and servers via APIs, to deliver an interactive and insightful user experience. React was the primary choice for frontend stack because it brought in the following benefits 

• Declarative syntax of reusable UI components, to easily scale up the solution
• True frontend independently testable components
• High rendering performance, for a fast and smooth user experience
• ES6 & other modern best practice Javascript development
• Isomorphic rendering for both performance and SEO
• Path to native mobile solution in the future

The Backend

The portal backend is built on Drupal 8, which does most of the content management heavy lifting. All content assets made available on the portal are managed and pushed by Drupal, to ensure a seamless customer journey on each projects. 

Besides Drupal, the backend stack is made up of:

• Hapi, for input validation, uniform error handling, authorization. The tools offers the required level of abstraction to be used by multiple teams
• Mssql-js, for a more maintainable code base, and less coupling with database
• Postgrator, a database migration tool to ensure that the database schema used from a given service is up to date. It automatically applies missing migration scripts
• Bunyan as a logger, which stores output logs as JSON object, for a better automatic processing

Because the Srijan team was working with valuable client data, the development process ensured that they treated CST information with utmost confidentiality and adhered to the client’s security guidelines before, during, and post-development.

Business Benefits

• All information and assets at one place gives CSTs a single source of truth and maintains consistent communication and experience for the customer

• New portals can be rolled out for different clients in 4-6 weeks, as the solution created is completely reusable and customizable

Marrying Drupal's superior content management capabilities with well-designed frontend experience delivered via React makes for high-performance enterprise solutions. Decoupled Drupal solutions are are becoming a key part of several IT infrastructures that already use the Drupal CMS. 

Srijan is working with global enterprises to drive digital transformation with Drupal and other emerging technologies.

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