Document Version 1.0 Prepared by Paul Grotevant and
Christina Konstantinidou, ITS
Last Edited May 8, 2015
PLAN REQUIREMENTS SOLUTION ANALYSIS DESIGN BUILD TEST TRAIN/DEPLOY MAINTENANCE
Project Charter
Executive Summary
The campus Drupal community and Web Technology Infrastructure (WTI) Subcommittee have been requesting increased support for Drupal for several years. To fulfill this request, Information Technology Services (ITS) is building a Managed Drupal service. The Managed Drupal service will provide simplified, scalable management of Drupal websites; a supported site-building platform in the form of a Drupal distribution containing UT-specific functionality and themes; and technical support and content strategy consultation for campus site owners.
The Managed Drupal Implementation Project (MDIP) will include the development of the service and its functions, a period of integration and onboarding on the selected 3rd party hosted platform (Pantheon One), and a pilot phase that will include the migration of a selection of sites representing various use cases to the new service.
Business Need and Background
Based on demand from IT governance and the campus Drupal community, as well as an internal need for the scalable management of large numbers of sites, ITS plans to build a Managed Drupal service. This service will provide simplified, scalable management of Drupal websites; a supported site-building platform in the form of a Drupal distribution containing UT-specific functionality and themes; and technical support and content strategy consultation for campus site owners. The technical foundation of the service will be dedicated Drupal hosting infrastructure that is optimized for performance, streamlined maintenance, and community-requested features.
The business need for a Managed Drupal service at UT Austin can be divided into three main categories: Community Demand for Central Management
Use of Drupal at UT Austin has been steadily increasing as Web publishers have continued to transition from static HTML technology to dynamic content management systems. As Drupal adoption has increased, many units at the University are dealing with reductions in technical staff and are looking for ways to publish and manage complex websites with fewer resources. This situation has driven demand and fast growth for ITS’ managed WordPress service, sites.utexas.edu, and there has been similar demand for a managed Drupal
Brand Standards and Design
The University Communications department has been engaged in a multi-year project to redesign the university’s home and core pages, which includes a transition to using responsive design technology to accommodate the growing number of mobile Web users. The scope of this project also includes design templates and pre-built functionality for specific Web publishing use cases such as faculty profiles and course listings, which University Communications plans to provide to every campus unit in the form of a managed Drupal site-building “platform”. This platform will empower Web publishers to quickly build and easily maintain websites that fulfill the most common functional and design requirements at the university. Technology
Historically, the university’s legacy shared hosting platform did not provide strong support for Drupal due to specific technology constraints, which resulted in poor performance for Drupal sites. This situation drove the owners of many of the more advanced Drupal sites on campus to purchase virtual servers and managed server support from ITS. This situation should improve considerably with the October 2014 launch of UT Web, which provides most of the enabling technologies for a Drupal site to work with acceptable performance. However, there is a new class of Drupal-tuned cloud hosting providers which not only provide a highly managed hosting stack that is specifically tuned for Drupal, but also have sophisticated built-in tools for developer-focused tasks such as version control, continuous integration, and dev/stage/prod workflow. Additionally, these providers offer specialized products targeted at organizations that need to centrally manage large numbers of Drupal sites.
Project Description and Scope
Prior to the MDIP, ITS Apps completed the Managed Drupal Hosting Assessment (MDHA) project which included the documentation of a set of Managed Drupal service hosting requirements and use cases, the evaluation of potential Drupal hosting solutions to support the service, and the selection and procurement of the hosting solution that best met the requirements. After soliciting and evaluating detailed written proposals and on-site demos from vendors, an internal evaluation team determined that Pantheon One represents the best product choice for the Managed Drupal service.
The Managed Drupal Implementation Project will include the following:
The design and development of the new service, i.e. define the funding model, the Service Level Agreement, the documentation, etc.
The investigation of possible integration needs that might be created while using ITS technologies on the Pantheon One platform (e.g. authentication, SSL certificates).
Allow web publishers to easily create sophisticated UT-branded, responsively designed websites in Drupal using a common site platform, which will include a UT-branded theme, and common functionality in the form of modular features that can be enabled or disabled.
Allow web publishers to leverage the benefits of Drupal-optimized hosting and developer tools by migrating existing sites or building new sites from a Drupal core distribution, i.e. use of the common site platform not required.
Allow ITS to provide a scalable Drupal management service for web publishers who do not want or have the capacity to be responsible for their site’s core and module updates, creating a “shared services”-like model for Drupal site maintenance.
In partnership with University Communications, provide content strategy support for web publishers migrating or creating sites in a Managed Drupal service.
Project Schedule
The project will include seven phases. The Plan phase will include all of the project initiation activities. During the Requirements and Solution Analysis phases all of the integration needs of using ITS technologies on the Pantheon One platform will be identified. The Design phase will include the design and development of the business model of the service. The Test phase will include the service’s team onboarding and testing of the Pantheon One platform in collaboration with Pantheon’s customer support team. The Migration phase will include the migration of a selected group of Drupal sites to Pantheon One. Finally, in the Deployment phase the service will be launched to UT web publishers.
A high-level project schedule is outlined below. At this time, the estimated completion is December 2015.
PHASE FTE Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
Plan 1 Requirements 1 Solution Analysis 1 Design 1 Test (Onboarding) 2 Migration (Pilot) 2 Deployment 1
Project Management and Governance
Project Facilities and Resources
The following staff resources will be required for this project:
IT Manager: 0.15 FTE
Role Name(s)/Organization(s) Responsibilities
Executive Sponsor Julienne VanDerZiel, ITS Applications
Review and approve changes in project scope, schedule and budget.
Customer Steering Committee
Michael Caldwell, Office of Admissions
Aaron Choate, University of Texas Libraries
Bryan Christian, University Communications
Tim Fackler, College of Liberal Arts Blake Justice, University Unions Lori Lacy, LBJ School of Public
Affairs
Matt Mangum, Cockrell School of Engineering
Steven Nevers, Moody College of Communication
Sara Somabhatta, University Development Office
Sarah Snow, College of Fine Arts
Provide sign-off for project deliverables.
Make recommendations regarding changes to project scope,
schedule, and budget.
Project Team Francine Bray Mark Fullmer Joe Goodman Paul Grotevant Christina Konstantinidou Mike Marcello Kathy Perry
Create project deliverables and documentation.
Information Security Office Point of Contact
Jason Ragland Customer Support
Services Point of Contact Jeff Hauger
Stakeholder(s) Campus Drupal developers University CSUs using Drupal
Impact Analysis
Current University Drupal developers and application administrators will be encouraged to migrate existing sites and build new sites on the Managed Drupal service.
Assumptions
The solution is only intended to support websites built on the Drupal CMS platform.
The Managed Drupal service will be owned and sustained by the Web and Contract Services team in ITS Applications.
Constraints
Any desired features of the Managed Drupal service must be supported by the Pantheon website management platform.
The project schedule will be dependent on departments following the migration plan. Any delays during the migration will result in delaying the actual launch of the service.
Risks
Dependency on contract negotiations and procurement process for the Pantheon One platform may cause delays in the project schedule.
Integrating ITS technologies with the Pantheon One platform may result in additional work and delays in the project schedule.
Dependency on the Digital Experience Project Phase 2 work may cause delays in the project schedule.
Revision History
Version Date Updater Name Description
V 0.1 3/19/2015 Paul Grotevant and Christina Konstantinidou
Initial draft completed. V 0.2 3/23/2015 Paul Grotevant and Christina
Konstantinidou
Initial feedback from the team was incorporated.
V 0.3 3/27/2015 Paul Grotevant and Christina
Konstantinidou Approved by the Director with minor edits. V 1.0 4/27/2015 Paul Grotevant and Christina
