University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine
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Introduction
When Roberta Brown, Digital Communications Specialist, joined the Faculty of Medicine’s Office of Communications, she knew the school's expectations for excellence and innovation extended to her new role, which had responsibility for overseeing the implementation of the school’s online brand and managing the websites that make up its online presence. Brown’s first assignment was to revamp the Faculty of Medicine’s flagship website.
Approach
A critical step toward getting maintenance and support costs (and the time spent on them) under control was a move to Pantheon’s WebOps platform, recommended by Pantheon's partner agency Foster Interactive. This provided the right combination of Version Control for deploying code, replicable Dev, Test, Live environments, and a command-line tool, Terminus, that could be used to automate deployments.
Foster Interactive also employed Pantheon’s Custom Upstream tool to create an archetypical site that could share changes with all the other sites in the Distro. As new features, core updates or fixes were rolled out on the Upstream, all of the other independent sites in Distro became aware of and could inherit the changes.
Why Pantheon
The first Faculty of Medicine sites were hosted on the school’s internal servers, which were restricted to the extent that Brown and the Office of Communication had little ability to update sites. After shifting to Pantheon, Brown could quickly launch new sites and manage support tickets. “With the move to Pantheon, I’m completely independent,” says Brown. “I don’t have to wait for anyone. I don’t have to be in the office or be on a VPN to get to the server. I go in, set up my site and I’m off to the races. I love that we can set up a site and people can work on it before we start paying for the hosting,” Brown adds. “That, for me, is a really great thing.”
Foster Interactive also appreciates not having to spend time on DevOps configuration for each project. “I was wasting 10 hours per week at least on deployments,” says Aidan Foster, Principal at Foster Interactive. “We know that a project without Pantheon will need extra hours to set up workflows…that’s wasted time not spent on building new features.”
For Foster Interactive, the combination of a Drupal distro, Pantheon's Custom Upstreams, and automated testing make it possible to centralize and simplify site maintenance, which reduces the cost across all the sites. “We have extensive quality testing and deployment automation to allow us to minimize effort. We’ve scripted tools with complicated workflows,” says Foster. “We don’t want someone to push deploy 35 times because the odds of human error increase. We’re a small shop, but we punch above our weight—we do that with automation.”
We know that a project without Pantheon will need extra hours to set up workflows…that’s time that isn’t spent working on features.
— Aidan Foster, Principal at Foster Interactive
Results
The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto, together with Foster Interactive, were successful in orchestrating the rollout and subsequent management of over 35 distinct sites, and in reducing maintenance costs by a whopping 60 percent. Today, the Office of Communication single-handedly launches new sites for the Faculty of Medicine, manages and supports dozens of unique and complex websites, while maintaining consistent brand standards. Using Pantheon WebOps tools, Foster Interactive has been able to develop new site features, as needed, and maintains all of those sites by leveraging Upstreams and harnessing the power of automation.
With the move to Pantheon, I’m completely independent,” says Brown. “I don’t have to wait for anyone. I don’t have to be in the office or be on a VPN to get to the server. I go in, set up my site and I’m off to the races.
— Roberta Brown, Digital Communications Specialist University of Toronto
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