Need to Know 

  • The City of Edmonton uses Google Workspace to manage enterprise content and the Drupal CMS for web content management, but historically these two systems were siloed. 
  • Northern helped Edmonton bring these two disparate systems together by integrating Box content cloud, bridging ownership, versioning, publishing, and content lifecycle across their entire enterprise.
  • Northern’s Public Service team focused on usability, data syncing, search, and reporting so that Edmonton could rely on this hybrid platform as a true enterprise content management solution instead of a series of unrelated systems.

Client

The City of Edmonton is the municipal government responsible for managing Alberta's capital city.

Brief

The municipality's website runs on a hybrid platform that leverages Drupal for web content management, and digital asset repository Box for cloud-based storage. This platform provides a bridge to back-office authoring and content management tools, including Adobe Creative Suite and Google Workspace.

The City approached Northern to further develop the integration, making improvements to searchability, usability, file syncing, and reporting capabilities.

Challenge

The City of Edmonton identified the following issues affecting its publishing platform:

Usability

  • There were many ways to add new documents, but some of the interfaces were not designed for ease of use.
  • Searching didn’t always make it clear where source documents were stored, or indicate the authoritative version of documents.
  • While Drupal and Box were deeply integrated, there were deficiencies in how the solution was implemented in Drupal’s rich text editor, making content management overly complex and time-consuming.

Permissions

  • Permission management is handled differently in Drupal and Box, which created additional work for Edmonton’s digital team.
  • The solution was open and unrestricted, allowing for maximum flexibility. But for occasional users, this opened up more options than necessary for them to navigate.

Asset syncing

  • Caching is one of Drupal’s strengths, but because caching for Box is handled separately, there were often version or timing issues that impacted what a content owner could see in real time.
  • Due to separate caching approaches, Google Analytics and reporting were occasionally inaccurate.