Successfully standardizing on Drupal, at the enterprise level, requires much more than simply getting the technology inside the organization, especially when that organization is a highly regulated, federated government agency. Questions like “is the code secure?”, "where do we download code from?", "how do we do patching?", and "who is responsible when we have problems?" are common and challenging.

Despite the challenges, the objectives and mission we're tasked to fulfill are admirable:

To provide a cost-effective cloud service for public-facing web sites that offers a secure standard enterprise platform, tools and support services; maximizing policy, technology and knowledge reuse that empowers government to focus on mission communications.

For the last 18 months, our team has worked to fulfill this mission, by standing up this cloud service as well as successfully migrating public facing agency websites from legacy systems onto a common, Drupal-based platform. We've learned a tremendous amount so far, and are excited to share our story, tips and recommendations, and lessons learned.

In this session, we'll cover topics including:

• Infrastruture and Platform architectures for highly available Drupal
• Using Drupal distributions for patch management
• Build/Deploy methodologies for controlled distributed development
• Onboarding new customers to a Drupal platform
• Fostering community and collaboration
• Promoting standards while embracing flexibility