Johnson & Johnson

The resulting Drupal multisite solution has a master website and replicable processes for quickly creating a new site within a series of steps for the creative and content team, but with far less dependency on technical teams for development or deployment.
The solution allows for many brands to share a common core, while also allowing for technical changes on a per-brand level, including brand by brand support for hosting preferences. The site architecture is common across all sites, making them easier to upgrade and maintain. The approach allows for a Drupal multi-site management program that starts with one site but can be expanded to streamline application and website management initiatives over time as part of a program to improve efficiency, consolidation efforts and reduce costs.

To support Johnson & Johnson's preference for a clear approvals process due to time restrictions on the project, we were able to set up a full service team dedicated to completing their project in a limited series of sprints, all on a fixed budget. When certain brand program managers preferred to work agile, we shifted our dedicated team to an agile scrum process for the duration of that particular site’s redesign and launch.

Starting with a batch of D6 sites in 2011 - including Listerine and Neutrogena - we built a common installation profile. This included identifying standard contrib modules, such as Apache Solr and Varnish. Using the Aegir control panel to simplify deployment and management, we moved many sites from different hosts to our custom cloud hosting solution.

Brands now share the same host and can work independently, but on the same “doc root” (core instance of Drupal), avoiding multiple repositories and redundancy of code. Additionally, in order to ensure that multiple brands or agencies can work on solutions for the brands, we introduced a custom code verification process which blocks non-compliant code, ensuring sites are built to best-practice and in compliance with the approved Johnson & Johnson Drupal multisite distribution.