How do your microsites grow? Drupal Gardens for Enterprise

How do your microsites grow? Drupal Gardens for Enterprise

FFW Marketing
Thought byFFW Marketing
September 01, 2011

Congratulations! Years of working long hours finally paid off. You’re the CTO for a giant corporation. You’re in the majors now but you’re not stopping yet. You want to keep hitting it out of the park.

Congratulations! Years of working long hours finally paid off. You’re the CTO for a giant corporation. You’re in the majors now but you’re not stopping yet. You want to keep hitting it out of the park.

The enterprise has one website that serves as the public face for the brand but it’s not enough. There’s one to handle your goods and services, a social site for your community, a marketing site for events and information, as well as websites for every department of the corporation. And since the enterprise is a global entity, each site has a version translated into English, French, Spanish and Chinese.

On your first day as chief, you find out that you have to launch a new microsite in two days.

If this sounds like a normal 9 - 5, you’re faced with the daunting task of creating, managing, and maintaining hundreds, if not thousands, of microsites. Good thing there’s Drupal Gardens. With DaaS, scaling microsites for enterprises (all 3,000 of them) is doable.

Since its  introduction to the community at DrupalCon Paris by Acquia, Gardens has bloomed to an astounding 60,000 websites. The service allows subscribers to build as many websites as they want without worrying about the hassles of hosting--installation, security updates, PHP allocations, etc. Other great features of Drupal Gardens include:

  • Community enabled
  • Scalable, high performance
  • Custom forms and surveys
  • Customized domains
  • Roll out duplicate sites and templates into new sites
  • Enhanced social publishing such as multiuser authoring

For enterprises, Gardens is a low-risk, high-ROI solution to the challenge of branding microsites--each with its own specific purpose and look--under the same name. Our team is working with  enterprises to reduce costs and accelerate time to market using open source Drupal solutions. Gardens is just one of those ways.

While Gardens has a lot of great features, the host controls the code so you can’t build custom modules. If your enterprise wants custom modules, you can always take your starter site and export it out of Gardens to play and tweak with the code. FFW is working closely Acquia by recommending ways Gardens can extend features for the enterprise.