Astellas Corporate Website Platform

By CI&T, Acquia on 11 December 2017

Astellas wanted to create a global website, as well as be able to update and refresh its local sites. Each website’s objective was to provide the right information in a timely manner, and to create and maintain a channel between the company and its stakeholders.

We identified three main pillars to support a unified Astellas digital presence:

Web governance
New brand guidelines/Global rollout
Global optimization of the WEB Platform

Visit astellas.com →

Why Drupal was chosen:

With a global rollout in mind, reusability was important to keep in mind. With its standards, features and modules add-on capabilities, it was an easy decision when it came to choosing Drupal. Another benefit to Drupal was its cost model (proprietary/licenses vs open source) compared to other platforms evaluated.

Based on our experience, we know that Drupal is a powerful framework that provides out-of-the-box features that can be easily be extended and customized. This meant we could use Drupal’s existing features, yet customize the code where necessary. Also, Drupal’s offering of general-purpose, high-quality modules - such as Workbench Moderation - meant that we could employ code more quickly while meeting business requirements

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):

Drupal was chosen for this project for three reasons:

1. Optimization of web infrastructure and operation of the application

Astellas was facing an issue with similar platforms being created across the organization throughout different counties.
Complex operation team structure with team needing to be able to handle different platforms for different applications holding the Astellas local sites on different countries.
Difficulty to manage the content as for some countries no CMS solution was in use.

2. Stable operation and reliability

Due to the differences on the solutions used in different countries service levels were different between countries.
It was not possible to manage the operation and how the applications were running across the organization in a timely manner.
Difficulty to track the incidents in a centralized way.

3. Security

Each country needed to handle security measures independently and in different ways.
All the local sites spread across different countries needed to follow security measures independently.
In case of a security threat in a global scale it was not possible to apply security measures in a proper manner.
In addition to the merits intrinsic to Drupal: open source solution not requiring investments in licensing, significant support from the community, increasing number of big corporations using Drupal.

Technical specifications

Drupal version:

Drupal 8.x

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:

Acquia Lightning
At the beginning of the project, the decision of using Acquia Lightning distribution enabled us to accelerate the development with this selection of configuration and modules. Therefore, the backlog was consistently organized with everything that really generates value for the client. The Lightning distribution is pretty suitable with Acquia Cloud Site Factory Platform. Both together leverage us to a scenario where is possible to launch local sites quickly.

Workbench Workflow + Group
The Workbench Workflow module, which is available in this distribution combined with Group module provides a convenient way to organize the content lifecycle and fits all requirements in terms of content flow. Workbench Workflow concept is very quick and simple and allow us to configure the Workflow states and transitions, whereas Group module give us the granularity that we need to control all departments and the contents that belongs to them.

Panels
Each section of the website is organized in top pages which contains highlight blocks to the second level of content. Panels module enables us to have different templates which are assembled by an admin interface making the process to create and organize top pages efficiently.

Views
Views is the most powerful way to enhance the website with dynamic information and that is why it is used in almost all Drupal projects. The inclusion of Views in Drupal 8 core reinforces that. Astellas is using Views everywhere: top pages, news list, and search results page.

Organizations involved:

Team members: