WordPress In the Enterprise - East Bay WordPress Meetup

East Bay WordPress Meetup Anca Mosoiu,Tech Liminal

July 15, 2012

Enterprise Websites with WordPress Multisite

268 14th Street, Oakland, CA 94612 | Open 9:30 - 7 Monday - Friday | Drop-in co-working space, workshops and technology services | More info: http://www.techliminal.com

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Technology Hotspot & Salon

www.techliminal.com Content © 2011, Tech Liminal

Introduction

• Web Developer• Information Architect• 15 years of experience in

technology & marketing orgs• Enterprise apps + websites

• Technology Hotspot & Salon• Co-Working• Workshops, Conferences• Expert, friendly help with web &

social media

Anca Tech Liminal

[email protected]


Overview

• What do you mean by Enterprise?

• WordPress as a portal

• Case Studies

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Enterprise!

• Lots of people (>150)

• Departments / siloes

• Communication and standards directives

• Ownership and responsibility

• Laws / (Sarbanes Oxley)

• IT

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Siloes...

• Each Department has their own resources / budget

• They might have to use a single IT provider

• But may be allowed to host content (marketing) outside the corporate firewall.

• They don’t want other people in their stuff

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What Enterprise Users Want

• Ability to change their own websites

• Single-Signon

• User-Friendly

• Ownership, permissions, and process

• I don’t want those HR people to touch my stuff!

Control, Process, Support6


IT Concerns

• Hosting - Most Enterprise-level organizations are not on LAMP, but many have the ability to set it up

• WordPress MultiSite uses a medium amount of resources (must have its own VPS internally)

• Require Robust service contracts, insurance

• Off-site hosting (WordPress VIP, etc)

• Security (sensitive enterprise data)

• Access to corporate data behind the firewall

• People Search

• ERP systems

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Legal

• I am not a lawyer ...

• Sarbanes Oxley - requires well-documented process for handling financial information, makes CEO personally liable for accounting inaccuracies

• Customer data privacy

• Contracts (especially support)

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Why WordPress?


So Why WordPress?

• Many people in marketing / communication departments like it (and know how to use it)

• Quick “microsites” for product launches, marketing launches

• WordPress Multisite for larger-scale sites where departments want to collaborate

• Each Site can be owned by a department

• Each department can have a different layout, but similar branding (theme framework)

• Aggregate at the top-level site

• Integrate w/ corporate data systems

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Case StudiesWordPress Intranet

www.techliminal.com

The Solution

Aggregate announcements from

all site areas

Aggregate events postings from all site

areas

Feeds from other tools and areas

www.techliminal.com

The Intranet

Consistent look for all site areas - This is the

PR Dashboard

Lots of link to internal content

More feeds - useful for PR team

www.techliminal.com

Site Areas

• Each Site Area = 1 Site

• Specific set of people to update, maintain

• Some have their own blogs (+ pages)

• Same look and feel, standardized widget placement

• Combined through Navigation Menu

Custom Development (Menu Integration)

www.techliminal.com

This Week’s Events

• Feature is intended to replace weekly emails

• Aggregate content from within site areas

• Custom content type development

www.techliminal.com

Contributors, Authors

• Employees are assigned roles on sites (subscriber, contributor, author)

• Co-Authors Plus plugin to allow multiple owners for content

• Gravity Forms for custom data collection

• Google Apps / Forms / Calendar

www.techliminal.com

Things we had to customize

• One Menu made up multiple primary menus

• Retrieve posts from multiple sites (not through RSS)

• switch_to_blog = not good

• Integration w/ People Search functionality (REST API)

• Google Calendar Integration


Lessons Learned

• Plan for the hosting very early

• Find champions for the WordPress site within the organization

• Train developers to be self-sufficient

• Internal culture that allows development = good

• Nothing that “called home” was allowed inside the firewall (so no automatic upgrades)

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Questions?

• [email protected]

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