Sector(s)
Project Team
- Ashish Thakur: Tech Lead
- Kiran Rao: Scrum Master
- Rajeev Jaggavarapu: Sr. Devops Engineer
- Nitin Kumar: QA Lead
- Sami Ullah: QA Automation/Manual
- Udit Verma: Drupal Developer
- Surabhi Gokte: QA Automation/Manual
- Vishwa Chikate: Sr. Drupal Developer
- Jeson Dias: Sr. JS Developer
- Yogendra Prasad: Team Lead
- Akhil Desai: Sr. QA/Manual
- Amulya Malla: DevOps Engineer
- Pavan Keshavamurthy: Program Manager
Our client specializes in analytics and adaptive decision-making platforms, delivering tailored solutions for business collaboration. By leveraging platform engineering and advanced open-source frameworks, they help enterprises optimize sales, pricing, finance, and risk management operations.
Key Highlights
- Complex project involving Drupal, AngularJS, and Big Data
- Built to scale up
- Continuously improving approach
- Product engineering using agile and lean approach—first prototype built in two months
Initial Contact
The client team had evaluated and decided upon Drupal to build the product, and were looking for a Drupal agency to implement the project. They were looking or an agency that could function like their own engineering team, dedicatedly on the project. The company also wanted to keep their product development costs under control. And hence needed a Drupal development agency that could develop and deliver using the agile methodology.
They were referred to us by Acquia. Our open approach, contribution to product from the business perspective and consistent delivery earned the trust of the client.
About the project
Here are some of the key goals the OnCorps team was looking to achieve:
- Cross browser support: The client wanted the site to be made accessible across mobile devices across platforms. Keeping this emerging audience, a separate version of the site is being developed in AngularJS and the redesigning of the frontend is being done using HAML, CoffeScript and SAAS.
- The platform required a common set of features to be made available across different groups of people, within different enterprises ( PaaS model) with clear separation of roles, OG (Organic Groups) module served as perfect way to achieve this.
- Data is heavily segmented, so as to be able to build data visualization reports on various parameters. To achieve this we wrote a middle layer based on a ‘custom written data engine’ to save/read the analytics data. This engine can be switched to any storage engine with minimal effort without affecting the frontend rendering.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen for building the product platform because:
- The product platform is not a traditional content or social content publishing website. It has a series of forms, largely with objective single-choice fields that capture data on business use-cases through collaboration among community members within large enterprises. Drupal has been used as a framework on this application, rather than a publishing platform.
- The product was built using an iterative approach - rapid prototyping → customer demos → introducing new features based on customer feedback. This speed of change was impossible to meet with PHP or Ruby based frameworks, which is where Drupal fit in perfectly.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
There were three drupal modules which were used the most and those were:
CAS
The Central Authentication Service (CAS) is a single sign-on protocol for the web. Its purpose is to permit a user to access multiple applications while providing their credentials (such as userID and password) only once. It also allows web applications to authenticate users without gaining access to a user's security credentials, such as a password.
In OnCorps, CAS was used to facilitate the website to act as a CAS servers, allowing other websites to use it as the single sign-on source.
OG
This module enables users to create and manage their own 'groups'. Each group can have subscribers, and maintains a group home page where subscribers communicate amongst themselves.
In the company, OG was used for hierarchical role based access control where different groups are members of different organization and each user can have organization based access or group based access or both depending on the hierarchy.
simpleSAMLphp_auth
This module integrates Drupal with SimpleSAMLphp, the most robust and complete implementation of SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language is a standard protocol for web browser Single Sign-On (SSO) using secure tokens) in PHP. It makes it possible for Drupal to communicate with SAML or Shibboleth identity providers (IdP) for authenticating users. The resulting Drupal site can effectively act as a SAML or Shibboleth service provider (SP).
In the organization, simplesamlphp_auth allows their clients to use their SAML based identity provider as a user repository.
The Engagement Approach and Business Benefits
- Committed to Continuously Improve: We are of the firm belief that to build the right product, the development team needs to have a continuously improving approach without burdening the customer with the costs involved to achieve this. With this product too, we followed this approach, thus displaying its commitment to the success of the product.
- Development continuity: We offered a dedicated engineering team to the client. This ensured the continuity of the product development process and a streamlined communication with their team.
- Thought partner: We worked as a thought partner with the client and not as a development team waiting for client briefings. The engineering team added tremendous value just not in terms of implementation but at the level of ideation too.
- Cost savings: With the agile development methodology, the project was invoiced in the pay-as-you-go model. This methodology ensured that unnecessary features were not developed, thus wasting time, effort and costs.
- Complete security: We took measures to ensure that the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of the client was secured and maintained at all times.
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