This project is about a manufacturing organization having 20 years of experience in the sector of multi-material transformation. Farinia Group employs more than 1200 people in 11 plants in France, mastering 4 technologies: forge, casting, machining and additive manufacturing. They also, specialize in the material transformation using state-of-the art equipment, know-how and technical expertise. Farinia has innovation in the fields of forging, iron casting and metal additives manufacturing for the customers. Farinia delivers ready to fit the machine or configuration parts, designed and manufactured according to the demand of the respective industry. We needed to design and develop their employee portal.
About the project
The project was about creating an internal employee for Farinia. The portal would have standard social networking features like groups, feeds wall, user profiles and most notably LDAP integration. All their employee profiles would interact with the platform through LDAP integration. During the discovery phase, we found that drupal already had a good LDAP integration module which we could use as our base. But there were some customisations that were needed, and we custom coded those on top of the existing module, which we used as out base. Apart from LDAP, the client needed a strong CMS functionality, where user could add their own content and publish them for their peers, be able to post news and events, all conjured up through standard Drupal content types and API. For groups, we used Organic Groups and altered it as per need through it's API. For facebook style wall, we used the statuses module and used FBSMP module as addon. The end product was a feature rich internal portal, and the client was extremely happy with the outcome, look and feel and the ease of usage.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen because the of it's exceptional content management system and excellent community support that helped to roll out various features and functionalities with perfect and under huge time constraint. The employee portal needed to be rolled out in a relatively short span of time, and we found that it would be immensely helpful to use certain existing drupal modules that could being down the development time. Also, drupal has a very robust API, which was great considering the future expansion plans for the project in mind.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
LDAP was implemented using the base LDAP module plus some of other integration modules to tweak it's behaviour. On top of that, it was heavily customised to suite client's needs. Groups feature was implemented using Organic Groups module and was integrated to LDAP through LDAP OG module. The facebook style wall was implemented using Statuses module and it's further customisation using the hooks exposed and views. Friend request feature was implemented using User relationships module and Follow feature was implemented using the Flags module.
