Drupal at scale in the Australian National University

Time: Thursday 21st March 10:00-10:30
Room: Main Ballroom
Track: Drupal Development

This session is a must-attend for professionals seeking insights into web management operations within small web teams in large organisations and learning how to achieve scalable growth while delivering high-impact and meaningful outcomes for clients.
Founded in 1946 and situated in Canberra, The Australian National University is a prestigious public research university and a member of the Group of Eight. ANU currently enrols 17,380 undergraduate and postgraduate students and employs 4,500 staff members.
In web management, ANU stands as a vast, decentralised organisation comprised by seven colleges and research institutes. Despite the size, our small web team of 4 people is responsible for providing web services to 38 websites and serving the diverse needs of hundreds of staff and students from the Colleges of Science, Health, and Medicine.
With a wealth of over 15 years of experience in the higher education sector, we have successfully developed a flexible Drupal multisite solution that comprehensively addresses the content management requirements of research schools, institutes, and centres. We have also incorporated good practices from the agile methodology to manage client relationships, backlog, team processes and leadership. This has allowed to ensure a sustainable future for the team and technology.
This session will include:
- Content architecture of education and research institutions.
- Site standardisation and synchronisation of multisites.
- User training and permission setting for optimal operation and disaster recovery.
- Negotiation of requirements and management of client expectations.
- Agile methodology for small team management.
- Migration of Drupal 7 sites.

Speakers

Dmitry Mikhailov
Web Team Lead of the College of Science and College of Health & Medicine at the Australian National University. Since 2010 I have been involved in building countless Drupal website projects across the higher education sector in both Australia and South America. I put a strong focus on service excellence, team empowerment, customer collaboration and creating sustainable working environments in which people flourish.
Additional speakersSamundra Sharma Pandit
Samundra is a web developer at the Australian National University since 2021. He loves programming in PHP, Javascript and Python. Previously he had managerial roles at IT Inspire and Bermuda Triangle Pvt. Ltd.