Business and Strategy

Like many federal agencies, the Department of the Interior contended with the cost and complexity of myriad individual web sites. Managed separately – and on disparate stacks – these sites:

• Induced high fixed operational costs,
• Limited the department’s flexibility to respond to visitor traffic fluctuations,
• And made third party integrations and mobile applications expensive and difficult to support.

Sound familiar?

Agencies are under increasing pressure to get more done with fewer resources - and in an increasingly interconnected world. Collaborating in a modern and mobile way across organizational boundaries is critical to mission execution for many agencies.

In this session I’ll explore how Open Atrium, a completely open source intra/extranet solution (based on Drupal), can reduce a extranet’s total cost of ownership, while providing a flexible and future friendly platform that you can extend or customization, with or without your vendor.

Donna Rodriguez is a Web Manager at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. She will discuss the trials and tribulations of building the public VA App Store. This year's journey began with changing our Drupal architecture, getting our environments set up correctly, refining our App Store design, and getting our template mobile responsive.

“Data science” is a term few had heard five years ago, but today we see it everywhere. The gathering, sharing, publishing, analyzing and visualization of of the data our institutions  produce have become vital to government, business, journalism and civil society.  It’s a big deal-- McKinsey estimates that opening up data worldwide across seven industries will unlock more than $3 trillion dollars of economic value.  

Drupal 8 is here. People are using it to replace existing systems and to launch new projects. How does Drupal 8 fit into your long-term strategy? More specifically: What questions do we need to be asking now so that your investment in Drupal is paying dividends five years from now? Ten years from now?

This session will address the assessment and planning that will help you create a successful outcome for your Drupal 8 project. We will cover the following specific areas:

We trained a wide variety of Content Managers from different fields and differing levels of technical knowledge--Detectives, Engineers, Accountants, GIS Analysts, and Interns--when we moved to ColoradoSprings.gov and Drupal as a CMS this past year.

Content migration is always a challenge for any website project, but public government sites pose a special challenge. Aside from the inevitable technical difficulties, there are questions that have particular nuances in this space:

This talk will use a case study overview of the FedRAMP authorization process for BlackMesh to illustrate portions of the authorization process that worked well, as well as challenges and lessons learned.

Your company is so lucky and just won a Drupal project. After the celebration, what is the next thing you have to do? You are going to build a brand new Drupal site. Where should you start?  We all want to do it right at first time to avoid rework. We want to use Agile timeboxed development to have early and frequent delivery to get customer feedback. But, Drupal has so many modules, which one should be build first? How could we build it right with Agile development cycles?

This session will describe how the NIH Library has been using Drupal to build awesome websites in support of science and research at NIH.  This includes a portfolio analysis site for Alzheimer's research (http://iadrp.nia.nih.gov), a Pain Research site (http://painresearch.nih.gov), a Pandemic Influenza Digital Archive (http://pida.nihlibrary.com) and an event page celebrating Pi Day at NIH (http://nihpiday.nih.gov).  The session will also discuss Drupal community building efforts being led by the library including user group meetings and plans for code/theme sharing across the ca