Cypress Semiconductor Extranet - Migrating ColdFusion to Drupal 8

By Valuebound on 6 April 2017

Cypress is the leading global semiconductor industry, including key segments of the automotive, industrial, home automation and appliances, medical products and consumer electronics businesses.

The world-class wireless technology—along with our MCUs, memories, analog ICs and USB controller which help in unparalleled position in the fast-growing Internet of Things, a business that cuts across our conventional markets and gives us a stake in exciting, next-generation segments such as connected and autonomous cars.

Cypress Extranet project is an extranet portal for the Sales Representatives and Distributors. And it acts as a “one-stop shop” for Sales Representatives and Distributors. Users expect access to all the most recently valued marketing files (from the Cypress SPEC System). The site should have easy search and options to download which should accessible anywhere, anytime on road or easily while on a conference.

Visit extranet.cypress.com →

Cypress Semiconductor Extranet Case Study Developed using Drupal 8

Why Drupal was chosen:

Cypress Semiconductor has their main website developed using Drupal 7 CMS. Extranet portal which was developed earlier in Adobe ColdFusion were primarily being used by Sales & Distributors, and is an extension of Cypress Corporate website. Cypress webmaster teams being familiar with managing and administering Drupal 7 CMS, it was natural choice to go with Drupal 8. Additionally, Drupal was chosen for the following business and strategic reasons:

Adaptable: This investment needs to be reusable or adaptable by cypress site admin.
Cost Effective: Building solution using Drupal framework has been more effective from cost and maintenance perspective compared to old custom application built in Adobe ColdFusion
Scale & Performance: The site has lots of files, few in size of Gigabytes. Which needed to be uploaded and downloaded in bulk.
Integration points: Easily connected to third party applications and API integrations for better accessibility

Why Drupal8?

Migration:
Legacy application contained both content and users, needed to be migrated to new system. Drupal 8 has matured & efficient in migration system.

Web Services:
There are lot of api integrations to connect with other enterprise systems which was built in Drupal 7 (main website) and Oracle applications. So we need to use both REST and SOAP methods for building the APIs.

Responsive Design:
The new application has to be performed in cross platforms including mobiles and Tabs. Drupal 8 ships with in-built Mobile First theme, Bartik.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):

The portal was to be built in a way to have controlled access to business partners, allowing a subset of information to be available from the intranet.
We had quite a few unique project requirement goals, few of them were -

Migration: Adobe ColdFusion system to Drupal 8.
File compression and Download: We needed a system, where user can select and download individually or collectively the files in a single click. There were pages where we have more than 100 number of files, cumulative size could be more than 1000mb.
File Search : The users for the website comprised of sales team on-field. The necessity was to implement a search and download option for files accessible while on-road or during meetings or conferences. They wanted to have all the files indexed and searchable for ease of access. By default we do not have file search option in Apache Solr. We integrated Tika library on Acquia Apache Solr server to create a robust search and indexing feature for the website to search through the content of file.
Integration with existing system : We needed to integrate the new system with existing Cypress shared user authentication application. Once User is logged in to cypress system, they will login to extranet site simultaneously.
User access to enterprise portal extranet site : Within the application, there was a requirement where a new site can be created within the extranet site for specific user group, which should be accessible to only assigned users. This subsite included its own specific content page and menu system. Web master should be able to create multiple of these subsites depending on business requirement.
Managing Users, Roles and Permission : We also had requirement where specific pages could be accessible to assigned user(s) or roles. These pages could have multiple files attached. Assigned users or users of a particular role should be able to access or download all files or selective files in zipped format from the permission defined by the Webmaster.
Advanced Searches : User can search for files by adding terms in advance search.

Technical Challenges:

Migration from the Legacy system which built on Cold Fusion.
Extranet portals : this is a whole new site within extranet with totally independent menus and submenus
Page Access : Page level access for viewing and Editing the content by users and roles.
File search: Search content across all files based on user access.
Extranet Clone: Inside the system, there will be a small extranet which will act as independent one for each distributors. This extranet will have their own content, menus and accesses.