Welk has been in the process of aligning their web properties with the Drupal CMS. In parallel, they wanted to build a new intranet to centralize internal communications and announcements and to provide more of a sense of pride and cohesion among employees from different resort locations
- The site needed to integrate with Okta single sign-on (SSO), but the existing Drupal modules available were not sufficient. In the end, we had to extend the Drupal Okta module with our own custom integration code.
- There were some issues with the project scope. We were supposed to leverage a pre-built theme to save on time. Unfortunately, we let stakeholders and design run unrestricted and, in the end, the theme became more of a hindrance than a help. We also agreed to include an unscoped Solr integration before uncovering all of the Okta issues, which led to a project overage.
- We did encounter some delays in timeline and increase in our deliverables due to their internal teams running low on bandwidth. As a result, we inherited the DevOps responsibilities and had to spin up a Kubernetes environment on Google Cloud Platform.
The solution leverages Drupal, a custom Okta integration, and a modern infrastructure built on Kubernetes.
The new intranet serves as the homepage for all employees across all locations when launching a browser on the Welk network. Stakeholders now have a means to make announcements and to increase employee-engagement.
Moreover, a new publication pipeline allows the organization to scale marketing efforts while retaining top-level approval on all content. The intranet launched right before Covid-19, and it proved an imperative tool as the cornerstone for employee communication throughout the pandemic.
