Drupal 7 Migration and Global Content Management of OSSCube’s Online Property

This case study demonstrates how the Multi-site with Multi-domain setup of OSSCube has been successfully migrated from Drupal 6.10 to Drupal 7.10 to achieve region-wise content localization, better performance and greater customer experience. Now OSSCube’s Multi-site with Multi-Domain setup runs from the same code base with one centralized database.

Business Scenario

The exponential growth of OSSCube, a global leader in Open Source Software Solutions, worldwide made its stockholders bring into place strategy of content localization to reliably meet current business needs. The idea was to convert the existing website location-wise in order to minimize local sensitivities and quickly respond to prospects across the US, UK and Asia region. A key factor involved in the migration was to automate the content publishing process to reduce publishing cycle for different domains with uncompromising performance.

Migration Challenges

• Migrating the Multi-site with Multi-Domain set up with different databases and one code base to Drupal 7 with a centralized DB.  
• Migration without disturbing the parallely running website promotional activities.
• One of the biggest but interesting challenges was URLs mapping and keeping path URLs with same name for different domains to ensure a more understandable name to the content (For example: .com/services., .co.uk/services and .in/services).
• 2000 + pages of content migration preserving internal and external linking.
• Seamless Integration of third party applications.
• Sync of database on different servers to prevent data isolation.

The Solution

OSSCube’s expert Drupal team collaboratively worked to come out with the least disruptive route for successfully switching the existing websites to Drupal 7 platform. The key drivers of migration solutions include:

• Common admin to effectively manage multiple sites to reduce manual task of content updation
• Mega menu integration with new theme and structure , but same URLs name
• Huge data migration preserving the external and internal links of website’s multi domains
• Micro RDF integration
• Domain-wise Google checkout integration and seamless integration between SugarCRM and Drupal 7 for better lead tracking
• Gotowebinar API integration to retrieve the organizer and attendee history for the one or more events
• The Zend Caching for Performance optimization

Now the end solution supports the best of both worlds – central management database combined with providing unique experiences to the customers.

Results

• Fast and easy content updation for different domains
• Search engine and page load performance improvements
• Fast search inside the website
• Seamless integration with third party applications

Drupal 7 Migration Lessons

Upgrading our websites from Drupal 6 to 7 has given us our own standard workflow and improved practice to make the migration process smoother and faster. We are now better prepared to simplify the Drupal 7 migration process of any complexity, plus present a proven strategy that will help you get results faster with cost benefits.