CCA For Social Good
Challenge
Multi-Tenant Umbraco Cloud Solution Leveraging Umbraco Cloud to build a multi-tenant website management platform. Challenge CCA For Social Good needed a content management solution that would allow for the agility to service 30+ websites simultaneously with the ability to scale.
Solution
A multi-tenant solution built on the Umbraco Cloud platform that allows for the seamless management of multiple websites at once. Background CCA For Social Good is an operating division of CCA Global Partners, a privately held cooperative helping small businesses thrive for 30 years. CCA For Social Good provides web-based platforms that help thousands of nonprofit organizations and early childhood education (ECE) centers manage the administrative aspect of their organizations. With the goal of providing tools and resources to address the diversified needs of early childhood education and care professionals, CCA For Social Good created an online knowledge hub, the ECE Shared Resources platform, to provide all the tools a childcare business needs to be more efficient, more effective, and more successful. The ECE Shared Resources platform is informed by the brightest ECE minds from across the country, allowing everyone, in every partner state, to benefit from the over 1,600 resources and tools created from this collective sharing of knowledge and expertise. Research and Discovery As resources and challenges differ from state to state, the platform, originally built with Ektron CMS, allowed CCA For Social Good to create separate websites for members in each subscribing state. Each with distinct branding and content in addition to the 1,600 shared resources and tools. As with any enterprise application, long-term agility and scalability are always of parament importance. Each website on the Ektron platform was being developed as a single-tenant application with its own codebase. While this allowed for the maximum amount of customization per website, it also presented some unique challenges from a digital agility and reporting perspective. CCA For Social Good partnered with Diagram to build a solution that would ensure scalability and security while also reducing time-to-market and increasing telemetry across all of the websites on their platform. Architecting for Scale with Umbraco Our primary focus when approaching this project was building a future-proofed solution that could quickly and seamlessly scale with the client's growth which included 30+ individual websites already subscribed, and more being added regularly. After performing an analysis of CMS systems that would provide the best foundation for this platform, we decided on building a multi-tenant solution on top of Umbraco Cloud. Umbraco Cloud provided a perfect framework that would allow us to create a customized multi-tenant solution to manage multiple websites at once. And using our Umbraco Accelerator as the foundation, getting the platform up and running could be tackled in a fraction of the time and at a much-reduced cost. Custom Middleware At the heart of this solution was the development of a custom multi-tenant middleware system to aggregate data across all the websites. Based on a publisher and subscriber model, this content synchronization, tracking, and reporting tool allows for the global syndication of all content for the subscriber websites while allowing for the flexibility of custom content per subscriber website. Additional features built into the platform included: Normalization of all website forms and custom form data into modules within the custom middleware solution Creation of a sophisticated website registration workflow and approval process Introduction of next-level security not only to the platform but also to the self-service features on the website Creating a website theming system consisting of hundreds of combinations of possible website colors, styles, etc. Design that seamlessly scales across devices and screen sizes
Results
When the platform was launched, we were able to roll out over 30 custom websites for participating members in a single week. This significant reduction in time-to-market for new websites gives CCA an incredible amount of agility when engaging with new customers. Additionally, the automated reporting capabilities and the elimination of site-by-site custom development has substantially reduced the burden on CCA's team allowing them to continually focus on their members and the growth of their organization.
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