SUNY Fredonia Creates, Tests & Deploys New Student Services at Lightning Speed

Founded in 1826, the State University of New York (SUNY) at Fredonia serves around 3,600 students. Like many institutions in the competitive higher education sector, SUNY Fredonia relies on a lean web team to ensure high-performing websites that help attract and retain students and faculty. 

SUNY Fredonia turned to Pantheon’s agile, reliable WebOps platform to support its Drupal flagship site, the student portal and some 200 subsites. 

“The main reason we went with Pantheon was that we could entrust it with our code,” said Andrea Wasiura, Project Management Professional, Web Development Manager at SUNY Fredonia. “Previously, we spent so much time and energy just firefighting issues on the backend. I can't even tell you how relieved I was when we moved to Pantheon, and suddenly everything was so much simpler. We could develop high-priority projects and deploy them to production faster because it all works flawlessly.” 

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Legacy Platform Impedes Web Team Efficiency and Site Performance

SUNY Fredonia’s web properties serve the college's students, faculty and staff. These sites had one thing in common: slow performance and downtime. Occurring several times every quarter, they were frustrating for site visitors and for the three-person web team. 

The team struggled to manage a legacy platform that required a time-sapping, tedious manual development process – just creating a new test environment took more than 24 hours. To make matters worse, the team’s scant development tools cascaded errors from code changes and upgrades, further eroding the team’s productivity and website performance.  

It was like a WebOps double-whammy for the team. Tight budgets precluded hiring another developer and manual workflows hampered efficiency. The situation often caused project delays and made it impossible to meet stakeholder expectations and deadlines. 

WebOps Automation Tools Ensure Fast, Accurate Updates and Changes

The SUNY Fredonia web team decided to migrate its entire website portfolio to the Pantheon WebOps platform for its reliability, ease of management and automation capabilities. Pantheon’s support engineers and migration tools facilitated a seamless migration and enabled the team to work remotely with confidence. 

Pantheon’s productivity and automation tools like Multidev, Custom Upstreams and Autopilot work in harmony, enabling the web team and 200+ content creators to work side by side, saving dozens of hours on development projects. Spinning up new sites has gone from at least one day to 10 minutes. Updates now stay on schedule and content changes no longer cascade errors.

“Multidev allows us to easily create replicas of the production site on the same hardware, so we can test our changes before hitting the production site,” said Wasiura. “If there are any issues, we can quickly address them before going live.”

Autopilot, which automatically detects, tests and deploys updates, cuts the time it would normally take to update sites by half. 

Autopilot has helped us a lot. We really like the Visual Regression Testing checks because everything’s right there. We don’t have to go to each page individually; we can just look at the screen captures.

- Andrea Wasiura, Project Management Professional, Web Development Manager at SUNY Fredonia

Time Saved Enables Innovation and Speeds Project Delivery  

Thanks to Pantheon’s WebOps tools, which streamline site management and make it quick and easy to spin up new environments, the web team has realized a 75% time savings over the legacy environment to focus on improving website content and functionality – and on special projects that address students’ needs and interests. 

For example, Pantheon enabled Wasiura to lead a creative team in a digital signage project to keep students informed of high-level events and general announcements, such as health and safety. The project team developed an award-winning campus-wide digital signage system using Drupal and Concept3D’s Localist events platform. 

Using Multidev, Wasiura successfully built an application that uses JSON feeds to distribute event messages to dozens of Raspberry Pi devices, displaying the text on large, 4K monitors located throughout the campus. The signs display weather, photos and health and safety information to serve the students, as well as engage them regarding on-campus events. 

The digital signage system was a great example of how innovation can attract student engagement, and how Pantheon makes that innovation possible. Wasiura said, “Just recently, we decided to add a weather forecast to the digital signage and created a test environment in under 10 minutes. Developing the forecast app took under four hours to configure and deploy, and it works perfectly.”

Before Pantheon, it would have taken a day to copy over a testing environment to work in, and even then, we couldn’t be sure how well the project would work in production. Pantheon enables us to create, test and deploy new services at lightning speed."

- Andrea Wasiura, Project Management Professional, Web Development Manager at SUNY Fredonia

Jonathan Woolson, SUNY Fredonia’s Web Content Manager, summed up the team’s experience with Pantheon: “Once we moved to Pantheon and could rapidly develop sites, everything became so much simpler. We don’t have to worry about managing our cloud infrastructure; Pantheon takes care of the backend, allowing us to focus on projects that improve the quality of our stakeholders’ experiences.” 

Andrea Wasiura, Web Development Manager at SUNY FREDONIA, is a winner of 2023 Best in WebOps Awards. The Awards, presented by Pantheon, provide anyone with the opportunity to showcase their commitment to delivering truly amazing digital experiences that create value for their organizations, enable transformative change and unlock extraordinary performance. Wasiura wins the Individual Category for finding a better way to build and run websites.