Multnomah County migrated their website from Vignette to Drupal to reduce costs and improve usability. They conducted a successful pilot project using Drupal that demonstrated improvements like easier content editing, media handling, search, and uptime compared to their Vignette system. This led them to fully migrate over 50 sites to Drupal hosted on Amazon Web Services, reducing annual licensing and staffing costs while gaining capabilities previously not available in Vignette.

1. Migrating a Vignette Website To Drupal:
Story of Multnomah County
Joshua Mitchell Bryan House
Applications Manager Sr. Director, Marketing
Multnomah County Acquia
@bryanhouse

2. Upcoming Webinars
Thursday February 17th 9am ET / 2pm UTC
– Client Advisor Webinar - Drupal Staging and Deployment Best
Practices
Thursday February 24th 9am ET / 2pm UTC
- A Look Under the Hood at Acquia Hosting for Drupal Websites
Thursday February 24th 1pm ET / 6pm UTC
- Building Killer Developer Communities Fast with Drupal
Commons
Thursday March 24th 1pm ET / 6pm UTC
- Mobile-izing Your Organization with Drupal
Register Today - http://acquia.com/webinars

3. Upcoming Training Events - February & March 2011
http://training.acquia.com/events
February 23-25, Leuven, Belgium March 7-9, Edinburgh, Scotland
– Drupal Module Development – Drupal in a Day
Throughout February - March in Victoria, – Site Building with Drupal
Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal
March 21-24, Washington DC
Canada
– Drupal in a Day
– Drupal in a Day
– Site Building with Drupal
– Site Building with Drupal
March 29-31, Paris, France
– Theming and Module Development
– Drupal in a Day
March 1-3, Geneva, Switzerland
– Site Building with Drupal
– Drupal in a Day
– Site Building with Drupal
Register for Drupal Training in your area

4. Training @ DrupalCon:
Upgrading from Drupal 6 to 7
Conduct upgrades of sites, identify
pitfalls and gotchas
Learn methods and best practices for development
to ease upgrading to Drupal 7
Instructor Team:
– Erik Webb - Professional Services, The Inspector
– Jacob Singh - Engineer in Drupal Gardens, Mr. Media
– Joshua Brauer - Client Advisor, Dr. Deployment

5. Introduction
Joshua Mitchell
–Applications Manager General Government / Open Source
–Multnomah County

6. Migrating from
Vignette to Drupal
The Story of Multnomah County
Joshua Mitchell, IT Applications Manager, General Government and Open
Source, Multnomah County, Oregon

7. We started with a simple plan...
Redesign the website
Migrate from Vignette 7.3 to 7.5 in the process
A new CMS was off the table

8. 1 year later
Redesigned look and feel
County Chair Website (redesigned twice)
Homepage and three commissioners
Only three other sites had been migrated

9. Decision points
Vignette 7.6 released
Multnomah County hires first ever Open Source manager
OpenText buys Vignette
Vignette 8 released
Chance to test out cloud computing

10. Vignette Costs
Typical year cost is $143,711 in licensing and maintenance
Includes:
Per CPU licensing
Adapters for MS Office and MS Email/Exchange
Rich Text Editor (Extron and later ePhox)
Web Log Reporting
Vignette Portal - a tool for aggregating content into a
common "portal" often used for Intranets
...and paying for lots complicated licensing language

11. Vignette Costs (continued)
Full-time Vignette developer
Full-time Java/Vignette contractor
Full-time web designer
Full-time web manager (content and planning)
Two part-time content specialists
Part-time project manager
Part-time trainer

12. Why we decided to change directions
Not about price... but that didn't hurt

13. Why we decided to change directions
Usability
Adding and editing content was cumbersome.

14. Why we decided to change directions
Training
As the number of launched sites on Vignette grew, we realized
that training time was getting out of hand. Continuous requests
for ad hoc training or content edits by developers rather than
content owners.

15. Why we decided to change directions
Features
Image resizing (custom module $$)
Media handling (custom code $$)
Document management (additional license $$)
Adding these capabilities would have been costly additional
licenses from Vignette.

16. Pilot Project
April 12 - Executive buy in
April 19-21 - DrupalCon San Francisco (Crash Course)
June 21 - Hired Open Source (Drupal) Developer
June 30 - Launched Public Affairs Office and Jobs sites
August 1 - Pilot concludes and is declared a success

17. Pilot Project Successes
System handles images
Drupal allows users to upload full size images and associate
those images with other content. Upon display, Drupal
dynamically resizes, compresses, and generates the image in
three different sizes: thumbnail, display and large. These can all
be used for several slideshow solutions in the future and
additional sizes can be added as needed for instant generation.
System handles video and slideshow media
We have successfully created a standard way to display
YouTube, Flickr and other common media types.

18. Pilot Project Successes
Can categorize and tag content
This is base functionality in Drupal. For the pilot site we are
using tags and have a dynamically generated tag cloud.
System supports friendly URLs
Path aliases and global redirect give us friendly web addresses
that search engines love.
Revision control finally implemented
Moved the Drupal code base into an externally hosted
subversion account. Includes ability to deploy code up our
development stack.

19. Pilot Project Successes
RSS out of the box
This is base functionality in Drupal. All of our news and events
is automatically published to RSS feeds.
Powerful templating
We easily matched our look and feel and it is much easier to
role new features with a consistent design throughout the site.
Search
Starting with a module that integrates Google Custom Search
Engine. We have plans to move to Apache Solr and faceted
search.

20. Pilot Project Successes
Site archive and restoration
Backup and Migrate module takes a database snapshot every
two hours. Twice a day, we back up all the files on the site to all
our development environments and an internal server. Before
every code change we snapshot the entire server as a restore
point.
Site launches at the touch of a button
No developers are harmed in the making of a site. We can now
create a new site within seconds. (We used this to our
advantage to create a Google Apps training site on the fly in
about 2 hours.)

21. Pilot Project Successes
Webforms
Our users can be trained to create their own webforms for
collecting data and creating complicated contact forms.
Blogs, comments, public interaction, oh my
While we've been slow to release new blogs, Drupal gave us
the ability to role blog functionality into any new site.
(Warning... your government users may not be ready for this.)

22. Drupal Stack
AWS and Drupal: Two great tastes that go great together
Amazon’s Elastic Computing (EC2) environment with Elastic
Block Storage (EBS)
Pressflow (optimized version of Drupal)
Special configuration
Varnish for HTTP caching
Memcached for MySQL caching
APC for PHP caching

23. Drupal Stack
Elastic IP allows us to hot swap our UAT and Production
environments in ~3 seconds.
Estimated load capability of ~20,000 page views per
second.

24. Uptime Comparison
Vignette - Public Websites August 2010 through January 2011

25. Uptime Comparison
Drupal - Public Websites August 2010 through January 2011

26. Drupal Costs
No licensing or maintenance costs for our environment
Server costs are slightly less due to Amazon Web Services
environment. Use a package repository specifically
designed for optimized Drupal build.
Full 3-server AWS stack costs about $500 per month
including instance run time and bandwidth usage.
Fluctuates based on actual usage.
Hosted subversion is $50 per month.

27. Drupal Costs (continued)
Full-time Drupal developer
Full-time Java developer retrained to Drupal
Full-time web designer
Full-time web manager (content and planning)
Two part-time content specialists
Part-time project manager
Part-time Drupal trainer

28. Thank you
The finishing crew Helped along the way
Archie (Linux admin) Larry (integration)
Arun (engineering) Mike (integration)
Bob (engineering)
James (design) Moved on along the way
Julia (planning) Kashif (engineering)
Rachel (content) Nadya (project mgmt)
Sanne (content) Lee (training)
Stacey (training)
Xingwu (engineering)

29. Acquia [start!]
is Your
Enterprise
Drupal
Guide
[ enterprise
deployment ]
© 2011 Acquia, Inc. All rights reserved.

30. Start off right [start!]
with hands-on [Learn]
training
[ enterprise
deployment ]
© 2011 Acquia, Inc. All rights reserved.

31. Solutions to [start!]
build great
Drupal web [Build]
experiences
[ enterprise
deployment ]
© 2011 Acquia, Inc. All rights reserved.

32. Cloud service [start!]
platforms for
rapid, reliable
deployments
[Deploy ]
[ enterprise
deployment ]
© 2011 Acquia, Inc. All rights reserved.

33. Enterprise [start!]
24x7 support
from Drupal
professionals
[Operate]
[ enterprise
deployment ]
© 2011 Acquia, Inc. All rights reserved.

34. The Acquia Advantage
Training and Education +
Professional Services +
Global Partner Community +
Drupal Platform as a Service +
Expert Drupal Support +
Cloud-based Services +
[ A Drupal Sure Thing ]
© 2011 Acquia, Inc. All rights reserved.

35. Questions
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Contact us:
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