suny onondaga

Freed from the restrictions of its licensed Ektron platform, SUNY Onondaga Community College (OCC) benefits from the open-source community powering Drupal, and the ease of use the administration interface allows. 

OCC’s primary need was in back-end web development, migration, and Drupal 8 integration. 

Digital Echidna proposed a phased project approach to allow for a faster release of a Minimum Viable Product and ease of Drupal training or onboarding. OCC managed the wireframes and design iterations, using Echidna for user testing and for configuring the approved design into Drupal frontend theming. Starting with the main college website, the migration process offered an opportunity for spring cleaning – removing unnecessary or outdated content and introducing efficiency into the data architecture. Finished content is accessible and searchable with the SOLR search engine. 

A new Drupal-centric hosting platform, Acquia Cloud Platform, takes the infrastructure maintenance off internal staff, and provides robust uptime and peace of mind. Tasks that previously required a developer to modify code or work with Ektron’s configuration settings are now easily editable within the Drupal administration interface, saving both time and money for the organization. 

Key Integrations

Some integrations were completed as part of phase one, others in phase two:

• Colleague by Ellucian. Used to display course information throughout the site along with a faculty and staff directory

• RSS feeds for events and sports calendar

• Notification system for class cancellations

• 25Live software integration