Collaborating on Infrastructure Upgrades for Luxury Resorts
Client Engagement Info
Industry
Hospitality
Size
Enterprise
Years Serviced
< 1
Employee Intranet for Welk Resorts
Overview
Welk has been in the process of aligning their web properties with the Drupal CMS. In parallel, they wanted to build a new intranet to centralize internal communications and announcements and to provide more of a sense of pride and cohesion among employees from different resort locations
Challenges
- The site needed to integrate with Okta single sign-on (SSO), but the existing Drupal modules available were not sufficient. In the end, we had to extend the Drupal Okta module with our own custom integration code.
- There were some issues with the project scope. We were supposed to leverage a pre-built theme to save on time. Unfortunately, we let stakeholders and design run unrestricted and, in the end, the theme became more of a hindrance than a help. We also agreed to include an unscoped Solr integration before uncovering all of the Okta issues, which led to a project overage.
- We did encounter some delays in timeline and increase in our deliverables due to their internal teams running low on bandwidth. As a result, we inherited the DevOps responsibilities and had to spin up a Kubernetes environment on Google Cloud Platform.
Solution
The solution leverages Drupal, a custom Okta integration, and a modern infrastructure built on Kubernetes.
- UI/UX: Custom design and features based around needs of stakeholders
- Frontend: Built a custom sub-theme for a prebuilt Drupal theme
- Backend: Okta integration, Solr search integration, publication workflow
- Devops: Kubernetes on GCP running Docker containers
Technologies
Results
The new intranet serves as the homepage for all employees across all locations when launching a browser on the Welk network. Stakeholders now have a means to make announcements and to increase employee-engagement.
Moreover, a new publication pipeline allows the organization to scale marketing efforts while retaining top-level approval on all content. The intranet launched right before Covid-19, and it proved an imperative tool as the cornerstone for employee communication throughout the pandemic.
Find More Great Content
For the Welk Connection Intranet project and ongoing support, we worked closely with key stakeholders to prioritize features, outline timelines, and execute the design, development, and strategy for the project. For Owner’s Lounge, we collaborated with internal development teams and Red Door Interactive, leveraging the new WR.com theme as a base theme. We were in charge of implementation and worked closely with internal development teams to ensure they were able to be productive while still following Drupal best practices.
