 Hello everyone. We are just about to get started with today's webinar. We're going to let attendees trickle in to the audience before we get moving. And I want to welcome you all to another Drupal Association hosted webinar this time with our partner tag one to talk about a really interesting and really powerful case study. Before we jump right into the content. I'd love to do a little bit of housekeeping. Which is as you join us feel free to use the chat link in the zoom toolbar if you want to say hello to each other, make introductions. Chat about the presentation as we go you certainly are welcome to do that and we encourage you to do that. We'd love to know where you are where you're coming from as you join us. Also, we're happy to take your questions as part of this presentation. We'll have a section for q amp a at the end of the presentation in particular. So go ahead and use the q amp a tab if you have any questions as you're joining us, and we'll try and answer all of those there. Live captioning has been enabled on the slides does as well as a machine can so we'll see how things go there. And again welcome and thank you very much. All right, so I think we're going to go ahead and get started so thank you again everyone for joining us. On the Drupal Association hosted webinar with our partner tag one, we're going to talk about building an internet for global global 10 company, driving innovation fostering real time collaboration with ygs and Drupal. This is a really powerful case study about an organization using Drupal at a scale that's beyond most of what we can comprehend an organization with over 150,000 employees. I think there's a lot to learn from this presentation from the preview I've had myself and I hope you all enjoy it very much. So, with that, let's give some introductions here. So, my name is Tim Lennon I'm has to net on Drupal at org. I'm the CTO here at the Drupal Association, been in the community for over 15 years and I'm sure you've seen me around before. I'd like to encourage everyone joining us if you don't know more about the Drupal Association you can visit us on Drupal at org slash association become a member and support the Drupal project by supporting us as the nonprofit foundation. And with that, I'd like to hand it over to Michael Myers the managing director of tag one consulting to introduce himself and kick us off. Thank you, Tim so much really appreciate you having us to everyone who has joined us thank you for taking time out of your busy day. Hope you enjoy today's presentation. I'm really proud to have been a part of this project. This was an amazing effort across organizations, working together as one team. We can disclose who the client is but it's an amazing company with even more amazing people that we get to work with, and I'm excited that we can at least share and demo some of what we've done. So before we get started just a quick backgrounder on tag one, we're the number two all time contributor to Drupal, and we build applications for the largest global companies, as well as well known organizations in every sector, using Drupal, as well as many other technologies. As Tim mentioned at the top, I would strongly encourage your organizations to support the Drupal association is very meaningfully driving our business is why people come to us. It's why people want to come work for us, your engagement and involvement in the community and your support of the community will be an investment that returns massive dividends. So there are also one of the Drupal seven extended support providers and tag one quo which is our extended support product and service is trusted by the biggest users of Drupal. So if you need to continue running your Drupal seven site and can't migrate. We have you covered. If your D seven sites are meeting your organization's needs and you have no business read reason to migrate, then you don't have to, and we have you covered. And even if you do plan to migrate and upgrade, and you just need more time to do so, we can help you with that as well. Tag one quo enables you to continue to securely run and build on Drupal seven for another seven years after end of life in November of 22 next year. So, I'll start today's case study webinar with a quick background on the internet, along with some usage data just to kind of put things into context. Then we're going to talk about the growing pains and the challenges and what happens when a popular application can't continue to keep up with the pace of innovation that an organization requires. And we're going to touch on a really interesting challenge and unintended consequence that arose from the company adopting more and more SAS products and building more and more internal tools. Then we're going to focus on how we address these challenges by building a new internet using rapid prototyping and highlight some of the cool things we did like real time collaboration in Drupal. I'll give you some insight into the results and hopefully leave some time at the end for questions and Tim, please feel free to jump in as we go. So, to kick things off, a quick background in the situation that led to this project to give you a sense of things. This internet is a truly mission critical system that's at the heart of one of the largest companies in the world. It serves a very large and very active global user base, nearly one in three people that can access the system, use it every day. There's thousands of spaces or groups or whatever you want to call them in the system. That's where individual teams or projects or products or even special interest groups are going to get together, and they're going to collaborate on that thing that topic. These spaces contain millions and millions and millions of pages of content in many, many languages. There's over half a million files in the system, another 500 something thousand stored elsewhere and referenced. It's running on a massive global infrastructure that's fault tolerant to ensure it's like incredibly fast and always accessible. And, you know, it is an important part of how this organization collaborates. In addition to the internet, the organization also relies on a lot of other tools to foster collaboration and drive growth. Like most, they're adopting and relying more and more on SaaS solutions, things like Slack, Box, Quip, Tableau, Rike, list goes on and on and on. And it's great because these enable their teams to use the latest and greatest tools which helps keep them on the cutting edge. You know, so it's a huge benefit for the company. They also have a fast growing number of internal tools and applications that facilitate getting things done. You know, whether it's something that only they can build because it's internal or like the internet that we're going to talk about something that they want to build because they want a lot more control over it. And having this ability to create all of this custom tooling is another huge asset. And so by enabling their teams to use the tools that they want that they feel are the best for the, you know, the job that they need to get done, they're providing a tremendous amount of room to maneuver and execute and that's really critical to their success. The popularity and the heavy uses of these applications, you know, to, you know, what really drives a lot of their productivity and getting things done created major challenges on two critical fronts. It's something probably all of us in the audience can can imagine as we've all also adopted, maybe the Google App Suite and Slack and all sorts of and Trello and whatever else we've built. And now we have to say, where is the canonical place where X, Y or Z document or decision or question even lives across all of our systems. I certainly sympathize and can hardly manage it on this scale. I mean, it just it spirals out of control, you know, I on a scale that is, you know, becomes unfathomable and it has a counter, you know, a counter impact. The, yeah, the, the first, you know, their internet was crazy successful and it had been for many years but it was becoming clear that this software just wasn't going to continue to keep pace with the organization's need. It was the top of a very, you know, well known popular internet software and the vendor who they pay a lot of money and have a great relationship with kept saying, yeah, you know, we can add these features it's on our roadmap we're going to do that. We understand you need this functionality, but somehow they consistently fail to deliver, which is crazy given who this company is. And, you know, another problem was that the, the software wasn't scaling well. And so, you know, the, the more people were using it the more content that, you know, they were creating the slower it seemed to be getting. And that's obviously very problematic, you know, it's sort of self defeating. And users wanted significantly more control over everything, you know, from the content they created to the layout of these groups and spaces to being able to dynamically pull in content from other data sources and applications because of what Tim was talking about. You know, this led to user frustration. So they started to see little dips in numbers, you know, people were, you know, the product team is like vigilantly analyzing data and trends and on top of this system because it is so important to the company. When they start to see that people are getting frustrated. And, you know, that that productivity is dipping. That's been that they need to get out in front of. And so, you know, at a time when the company wanted to be fostering more collaboration, their internet, you know, which is all about collaboration was, you know, starting to handle it. And so this company is known for major innovations. And they set out in search of tools or considering building a tool that could drive that through collaboration. And in particular, real time collaboration which we'll talk a lot more about later. You know, the SAS, you know, you know, these internal apps had an unintended side effect, you know, that that now, as you know, we've all experienced them start to see more and more obvious but you know when you have multiple dated stores since project management tools, chat applications, digital visualization tools and so on and so forth like, you know, it's really hard to know what teams are using what and things change over time. And so it leads to scenarios that we've all been a part of like, oh man, like, you know, did you put that product description in the dropbox like, I swear I remember you mentioning it, you know, it wasn't in the team chat app or always email but I search both and I couldn't find it. What do you mean you put it in Slack I don't I don't think I'm in that channel like are you. One user in the Drupal community described the advent of Slack for example in the way it sort of transformed the way we work to be just an inbox generator, each channel becomes a new inbox. And then it integrates with your other tools and you don't know where you go and all these other things so finding things across them I have more unread Slack messages at the end of the day than emails now. And that's, you know, because an email at least I can send it off and take someone a few minutes to respond Slack they're like, Oh, I got you. You know, it's really great but they can also end up, you know, taking control of your life they can end up, you know, inhibiting productivity as opposed to maximizing it and so, you know, you know, maybe some of these problems aren't issues for smaller teams or in certain circumstances but you know, pretty quickly, they can get out of control, you know, and especially at a global scale when you're working across teams and divisions on a regular basis. You know that that is extremely problematic. And so, you know the question becomes you know these these systems are great they have a lot of upside and advantage and we want to enable people to do use them. But how do we mitigate that downside right like how do we keep the good and get rid of the bad. And then, you know, I think that another big challenge they had is that, you know, at every level of the organization, people were a little skeptical of the idea that that we could build a better mousetrap. You know, for example, if a very large company that focuses exclusively on this as their core business, you're paying a ton of money has continued to fail to deliver, you know, you think you can do a better job. And I think that we were pretty confident at least on a lot of the things that needed to get done, you know, this isn't this isn't a problem. But where things I think rightfully got complicated is they said, Well, okay, you know, I believe you can build a better mousetrap, but that mousetrap has a ton of features. And we're talking about rebuilding all of those and adding all these things they couldn't and adding all these things we want, like, how are you going to do that in a timely manner. And of course, all of us have heard the adage, you know, you can have a cheat fast or good pick two. And so it's like, Okay, we believe you can do it. And we believe you can build it on a good timeline, you know, but I'm not so sure you can do it in a cost effective manner. And so, you know, you know, we had to step back and say, Well, okay, how are you going to prove that you can do all of this. And until you can prove it, you know, you're not going to be able to, you know, make it happen. We solved that conundrum. Well, the product owner and his team did a ton of user engagement and interviews and analytics and research and, you know, this told them, you know, even more than they already knew about this application, which was a ton. And that enabled them to put together a really compelling pitch to key stakeholders and executives because they have concrete proof as to like how valuable and how widely used the system was. But look, give us the opportunity to put together a proof of concept. And they said, Okay, great. And if that proof of concept goes well, we might give you an opportunity to do some more proof of concepts and if you can continue doing these proof of concepts in a way that you know ultimately leads to an application. That's great. And so they gave us an initial bit of funding and some support and they said have at it. So initial three months was given some limited funding for the POC and we really knew that our strategy was going to be, you know, critical to our success. So we had to come up with an approach that would address the challenges that I've mentioned. And we came up with three main components. And first, we wanted to solve the hardest problems first. And if we could quickly and meaningfully demonstrate success in really difficult areas, it would one impress which we needed to do. And two, it would show them that we could make, you know, anything doable on a technical front and eliminate that as an as a concern or a risk. And then, you know, the challenge was, there was only so many home runs that we could hit right you know we needed to hit at least one or there wouldn't be a future. We wanted to hit to at least but you know we sat there thinking well even if we hit to that wouldn't be enough if that was all we deliver. So we needed to balance this out with something and what we did is we looked at that research with a product team and we looked at what the key influencers and the biggest users loved. And, you know, if we could build that easily and improve upon it, you know, or where there are features that had really, you know, they really wanted and they haven't been able to get could we do those quickly. If we try to, you know, cherry pick some, you know, low hanging fruit wow factors. But we also had to consider, you know, people judge a book by its cover. First impressions are really important, you know, if we just went out of the gate, and we built all the, you know, the table stakes no one would be impressed because everybody can do that. But if we delivered a POC that was just like a cool sort of, you know, rudimentary, you know, stick figure thing. It wouldn't be all that impressive. You know, so if we could make it look good, you know, if we could, you know, get some features in there it would really benefit us and so we said okay, let's focus on what we can get for really little costs or no effort on that front because it's going to drive a lot of value. We can't really invest a lot of time into it. So the other critical thing was the architecture of the POC. You can take certain liberties when you're, you know, doing a proof of concept you can cut corners, you know, you can do things that you just can't do in a production environment with a mission critical application in or just clearly off the table. You know, and so the challenge though as I mentioned was, you know, if we did get approval to turn this into a fully fledged application and it turned out that everything we had done was a throw away to get there. Well, we were going to face plant at that point you know we wouldn't be able to deliver that production application and that reasonable timeframe or budget we would have failed. So from day one we really had to kind of calculate and balance these short and long term, you know, needs, which is it's really challenging in the context of all these other things that we need to do. And so we ended up making some really interesting and difficult choices. And one of them, you know, ultimately this organization wanted a fully decoupled app for reasons I'm not going to get into but it made total sense. But we decided, you know, in conjunction with them that starting as a progressively decoupled app would greatly accelerate development. And that's because, you know, a lot of what makes Drupal so popular site building layout builder web forms you know these things work really well out of the box with a tightly coupled theme and so it's not that you can't leverage them when you're doing the couple but we're able to get so much more so quickly so it was sort of like a cost benefit analysis we don't have to put a lot of effort in, but we can meaningfully demonstrate oh there's way better layout control than what you have. Oh you can create really complex forms you can't do now. Oh my gosh you know and I'll talk about later you can pull together views from different data sources and export that into a block that's crazy, you know. This speaks to what you were saying on the previous slide about leveraging high value low hanging fruit that might not have looked like low hanging fruit to them right. Like I'm sure they didn't think that complex layouts would be low hanging fruit or things like that right. No, it's, it's really important. It got to the point like our first demo was so wow we had a kind of back pedal. We had to like start setting expectations like sprint to you're not going to see as big of a jump. It was, you know, it was, yeah, no it really impressed people as to what you can get out of it. Let's talk more about this in a minute accessibility and another great thing that you get out of the box and so, you know, we could still embed things and pulling you know with progressive the couple that gave us sort of the best of both worlds. Definitely some throwaway components definitely things we needed to rebuild but you know we needed to get traction and it was the best ratio. Another thing and this, this was the one to punch. The internal distributions in Drupal. So we've been working with this company for five or six years now time flies, and we've done a large number of projects across a lot of different divisions and we worked with them on this internal Drupal distribution that's used in the policies departments and projects and we use this as the foundation for that initial POC and literally in, you know, an afternoon, we were able to stand up a site that would have taken anyone else months to build a team of people months to build. You know it contained a theme, you know with the company's identity and branding and so you know instantly you stand up a site that looks just like every other internal site that they're going to be using. There's an instant familiarity and how it works because of the menuing, the content creation, the layout process, the workflows, it functions like every site and so anyone who's used any of these other systems can jump right in and exact knows exactly what to do right so there's like a user benefit to this demo as well. You know tremendous focus on things like accessibility, which you know I just mentioned and you know we had incorporated numerous accessibility improvements into the platform. And so this went over like a really important stakeholder group, you know they review and vet every application before it goes live, you know, to meet accessibility standards so the fact that we were able to, you know, launch a POC that exceeded what most applications do in their initial production release, like you know gained us you know credibility with these teams that love working with us because of these systems. But there's also a lot of really, you know great custom modules in the district that just so that we were able to leverage you know so a really great example is no corporate LDAP integration so your corporate login is your only log right you have the AID and we could grant people access to the POC so we can say hey here's a link go check it out yeah of course you have access, just log in. And you log in and you'd see you know all of your profile data was there and everybody else's profile data was there because we had just pulled it right out of the directory so you know again it just created this really smooth powerful and you know we do a lot of performance and scalability tuning and that's critical to them to. And so that was impressive as well. And so, you know, I really can't stress enough you know the power of internal open source and you know reusing and reusing upon code from past projects whether you do it you know, formally, or informally, you know it you know it just wowed and to the point where we had a back pedal and say, you know, this is, you know, we were very honest and open with everybody is to do it and this is why you know Drupal is a great benefit and we're actually now automating this into this insane platform where you can as an end user go in, click a button in the web portal and spin up your own version of this Internet or any other application and customize it and you know, so this really impress people to the point where it's become productized. One of the big reasons for creating this new Internet was to address, you know, those challenges that came as a result of all of these, you know, sass apps, you know, proliferating in the wild. And I think Drupal is a great choice for this I've always thought of Drupal as this input output mechanism with a great layer of tools on top, you know it's just an information broker. But the challenge with these 30 party apps is they don't all do what you want, you don't know what they do. You know, and so, you know, for the Internet to be the new hub, you know, it had to be able to pull in content from all these different data sources. And it had to be able to be controlled by user as if it was like a first class, you know, a citizen so you need to be able to, you know, put a box file into, you know, a post on a page, you know, it needed to be able to work with a preview. You know, so it had to seamlessly work in the Internet as if it were, you know, a capability not coming from box or some other system. But the interesting thing that we learned very quickly is, you know, why we could, you know, build and demo much of what was requested with these integrations. It really came down to like each individual platform and what could it do now versus what could it do in the future. Currently, you know, we couldn't deliver every feature and functionality and capability that people wanted, even in a POC, but we were able to do enough and gain enough credibility and confidence with people that they could see a clear path forward. We were able to say, you know, look, you know, quit doesn't do this, like that's not going to happen. You know, we can put in a feature request, you know, we have a lot of pull within with an organization given your weight. We can't guarantee that, whereas these people have said it's on their roadmap, and we have a, you know, a high degree of confidence we can make that happen when it's available. And so, you know, really it was just about making people comfortable with an understanding, you know, this is and isn't doable and hear the challenges that we're going to face in going about it and, you know, ultimately they decided it was worth pursuing. This integration piece is really interesting to me because you're walking the line between deciding where when you choose to meet the users where they already are. And when you choose to say, you know, as you say when you looked at the previous internet tool when you choose to say this component of it at least should be rebuilt or should be custom. And do you, can you explain perhaps what the process was when you were working with the client about choosing which which of those kind of pathways you took when it was the right choice to do these third party integrations versus when it was a choice to build the feature into the platform itself. Yeah, now something we talked a lot about you know some of it you know it's as always some of it's dictated by you know external factors in control somebody, you know a key stakeholder or team loves box you got to have that. You know, other times you know we look and say oh my gosh you know you're paying how many millions of dollars a year to license that application like triple does that out of the box. Like, you know, you know, for political reasons we didn't always necessarily go after those, you know but that's like one of one of the exciting things about the internet and where it's going is there they're tackling those things now actually so now they're going to those groups that you'll, you know, say tool acts are saying, we can even make it look exactly like tool actually wouldn't even know it's not to X anymore, we'll put our logo, you know. And, and, and you know we swear you won't know and we could save you, you know, $4 million next year, you know, why don't you give us one you keep three everybody wins. And people are saying, Oh, it's interesting. So, you know, I think that's going to be one of the amazing things, you know, but you got to be careful at the same point to because, you know, and this is one of the things I love about this organization is they don't want to put restrictions and constraints on things they want to, they want to influence you they want to provide guardrails they want to incentivize and de incentivize you to do certain things right like sure you can stand up a proprietary application, but wouldn't be a lot less expensive and faster if you click to button and you can do a Drupal install. Yeah, no, I think I think this is really interesting. And the point you make now is about sort of whether the organization itself focuses on user like conformity to the tools, right do they put that conformity of all their user groups and the sort of training of having everyone use the same thing as the way they kind of unified their process, or as you know this more open model where it's about finding the best tool for the job, and letting the users guide how those interact with each other and building something to unify them so I think it's just a powerful example at a scale that most of us are not used to. And the reality is it's a little above right because they just don't stand up a tool. I mean they like inspect the code that I mean they put these companies through the ringer before they'll even consider you know proof of concept in your application so it's, it's not like they're just, you know, turning on SAS applications, you know every minute, you know they do an insane amount of diligence, but they do it fast and better than than most we've ever seen. This this this flexible file management thing is similar to in the sense that like, and this is one of the coolest things I thought you know it's it might be a little simple to some people but you know when you create a new group. You know it's really beneficial to be able to create a slack space and a box folder and all of these things with it at the same time. You know, you know some people don't have the ability to create a slack channel, you know and maybe they shouldn't. But you know, there's some friction sometimes in the process and there's naming and location issues like your slack name doesn't match your box name, nothing's in the same place and so there's also sort of this organizational advantage of doing it through the system. But again you kind of have to accommodate, you know, any workflow to the degree that you reasonably can. So if you want to stand up a slack channel great, you can create a group and you can associate a group with it. If you have, you know the desire to create everything at once, you can, and that stream, you know it loves it because like oh my gosh I don't have to stand up, you know, six different SAS applications every time there's a new group. It just makes everyone's life faster and easy on the efficiency and collaboration front. I'll just touch on this real quick, a lesson that we learned early on. Another division in the company came and said oh we have this really cool thing that we've been, you know, prototyping ourselves, it would be really cool if you know we could take on the search component. And I was like oh man like I kind of wanted to do search because I'm constantly searching for things. So I thought it was like really helped me, and I could contribute to it as like as a user. But the product owner was like of course you guys can do it like because you know there's only so many things that we can do. He was really smart because he picked an application that was a nice to have and he handed it off to a third party. And it, you know, later on, unfortunately, you know, outside of their control, you know, priorities changed for that that group. And so they had to drop this is something that they really wanted to do themselves, but they just lost the opportunity to and in the end we lost nothing because we never promised it. You know, it wasn't critical to the POC, but had they been able to deliver it, it would have been amazing. And more importantly, it gave us like a working relationship with a user of the internet. You know, so now we were sort of like building relationships in sort of intertwined ways and getting bind and support from different groups throughout the company, you know just like that accessibility team, you know we needed to win everybody over in different ways. So this is perhaps the thing I you know I'm most excited about, you know, to me, collaboration is it's fundamental to the way that everybody, you know, works, learns how we teach, and working together is how we get things done, you know, and applications like content management systems and intranets are all about fostering collaboration but for some reason, you know, despite the fact that Google Docs came out in the early 2000s, you know, 2006 or so. No CMS in the market works the way that we do. No CMS works truly collaboratively and that's crazy. I was kind of thinking I was like, you know, like if I'm being honest, like, editing content in the CMS has always lagged behind user expectations, you know, he's kind of provided like just enough to get the job done. You know, we used to use, you know, MS word and cut and paste 20 years ago, you know, now we're just using a different tool to do it. You know, we've improved the editors they've gotten better. But, you know, for some reason editors just never keep up. And, you know, I don't unfortunately, you know, we've done multiple presentations on this topic alone. As you know, synchronous collaboration is extremely difficult to engineer into an application. That's one of the main reasons why applications don't do it, because nobody has the budget to do it, or at least until recently they didn't and that's an exciting change. You know, and so, you know, a major goal of this internet was to increase collaboration in particular they wanted more, you know, real time collaboration, because of their global distributed nature and more people working from home than ever before. There's a lot about this in the early POC phases we drafted requirements we did research, then if I potential solutions. And then we had to do a POC to show that we even do a POC for this because it was so, you know, it was kind of crazy. It was a really fun out there idea. And our research was really promising we did like we won over a lot of people with really cool ideas and concrete research. And they gave us the funding with the caveat that we spin it up as a second team, you know, doing that in parallel with our primary team, enabling them to collaborate but doing it in such a way that we would never block each other. They were willing to take a bet on it because it was so awesome and would drive so much value if we can deliver, but it was too risky that they didn't want to couple it to the other application, which is challenging because content creation is a couple from where it lands absolutely. Yeah, this is one of the coolest things I worked on in a very, very long time. So we added real time collaboration into Drupal using why jazz, I'll give you a little demo here. Why jazz is an open source real time shared editing framework and it enables you to make any application collaborative. So basically you can do shared to do list whiteboarding 3d modeling editing, it does everything, it just, you know, it abstracts all the complexity, and it gives you a ton of flexibility. So it's network agnostic, for example, and so this is actually in the background of no jazz application in a client server configuration using WebSockets, you know, and I can't show you the Internet itself but I was able to kind of like crop out this this is an early prototype before it started to look like anything identifiable. It's running in a pre launch version of a custom editor reveal, we built which is another really cool topic, you know, embedding and getting all these things into, you know, your content is super easy if you have an editor. So what you see here is two people using the Internet working together on a document with, you know, pretty much everything you'd expect from Google Docs, you know, President's Awareness who's online, you know, what are they doing where's their cursor what's highlighted, you know, editorial workflow components like inline comments global on redo, new redo for multiple authors. And it's running on a fully fault tolerant highly available infrastructure across multiple data centers with users in, you know, geographic, you know locations across the world from each other with insane performance like this, this POC really blew everyone including ourselves away it was it was so cool. As an aside, this is totally separate from an independent of the Internet project but I had to mention it because I'm so excited about this collaboration stuff. We also built an open source proof of concept in WordPress using YGS with the Gutenberg editor. This is because Malmweg has talked openly, you know, for a long time now about how real time collaboration is a critical part of the the future of WordPress and their roadmap. And so we wanted to show the Gutenberg team and automatic the power of YGS and how it solves a lot of the challenges that their early attempts that they had done in the community, you know, we just didn't feel, you know, did it, you know, did justice. And we wanted to show them that, you know what they wanted to do in the future was actually very doable today. And we want to add, you know, collaboration to every application every CMS out there. So, whereas the Internet was a client server implementation. This is a secure peer to peer implementation using WebRTC. And what's super cool about it is that any WordPress site, even the smallest shared hosting provider could run this out of the box without installing a single piece of software other WordPress. So, it's pretty wild. And, you know, the last thing I want to touch on is, you can start to see that there's a lot more to real time collaboration and even just a CMS, then shared editing, you know, you saw some layout building there. And so, you know, working together with your peers on the look and feel and the design of your pages is also something that could be done, you know, collaboratively. So, and of course, Drupal supports Gutenberg so you can take some of that code and check it out and do some integration yourself. The last big thing I want to talk about, you know, as we were wrapping up the the POC phases, you know, and looking more and more likely like this is going to greenlit to be a full on project. More and more groups about the company were weighing in and kicking the tires and looking under the hood. And it was really exciting because we, you know, we watched our little POC sort of like snowball downhill and become this, you know, giant beast that everyone was really excited about. But the problem is that that hill was the minefield. And at any moment, like one of those groups could just, you know, evaporate that snowball the map, no matter how big it had gotten. And that about happened. You know, one of these groups is their DDA group that supports mission critical applications after they go live. And so, you know, we built many other mission critical applications on my sequel with the company. I own my sequel apps and, you know, believe me when I tell you they fire drill these applications beyond belief, you know, they know these systems are fully fault tolerant and highly available, you know, monthly. They have no doubt that this can work. But they threw out a challenge and they said, okay, you know, great, but you know, sure, my sequel supported and we run mission critical applications on it. But this is our internet. This is mission critical. Apparently another level of mission critical. And they have an Oracle support contract that apparently is second to none. I gotta know if you're texting, you know, Larry like hey dude I need some help or if there are like oracles you know just floating around you waiting to need help but they you know their opinion was we need to be able to run this application or Oracle because it's so critical to the company, and we have no better way to do it than this package that's crazy supported. So it's not that we were against Oracle. It's that you know we're trying to manage risk in a POC. And I mean, we are some of the most well known contributors to Drupal, we've been doing this for 17 years. And no one, no one we knew no we get a hold of no one knew anyone would ever run an active active Oracle configuration in anything, you know, anything like this. And, you know, we, you know, we didn't know what would happen like what all sorts of you know would this be a major step backwards to the application with all sorts of things break you know what would go wrong. What does that mean to our timeline, you know, and forget about our application, like, what if this goes live, like we, we've battle tested my sequel, you know, over and over and over again just at this company like we know it works like so that that risk that unknown you know our reputation is on the line as much as theirs. It just made us like, you know, nervous, I mean really really nervous but hey, we're you know we're building POC as we said, let's see what happens. And we did it because this was you know something that needed to be addressed, and we threw a bunch of resources on in the next sprint. And it's not fun to go into a sprint having no idea what it's going to take to get something done, you know whether or not you can do it like that's not a place that we typically operate from, even with stuff like real time collaboration, we had a really good sense of what we could or couldn't do, based in the research and this was like, yesterday you said do this and today we're saying. Okay. We were blown away. It took us less than the entire sprint to build it, you know, there's a good Oracle driver for Drupal. It did need a couple of enhancements and changes and tweaks but you know the, the repercussions or you know the ripple effect wasn't there and that was you know a huge sigh of relief. And, and, and, you know, it was good on one hand, because you know it calmed our fears that it could be done easily, but it's still kind of nagged us in the back of our mind is this really the best decision for the company given the unknowns and the risks. What I didn't expect and this was really interesting is that, you know, if you think about like a big, you know, Fortune 500 company, you know, these people operate with insane technologies and and frankly, some of them look at PHP as like a rinky dink technology doesn't matter that it powers 80% of the web, you know, they're doing, you know, assembly. You know, they are as hardcore as it gets or whatever it is, you know, from their perspective, it's just not what they would use it's not what they know. And, you know, I we were so proud, you know, at the end of this not at what we had just achieved and what you know, but what Drupal had achieved, and these people who, you know, we're talking some smack, you know, at different times about you know, forget about Drupal just PHP were like, you know, even they had to kind of step back at this point and say wow, you know, this is, I don't, I'm not saying I love PHP but wow that was that was cool. That was impressive. So, you know, the results. I wish I could share a lot of information and data with you guys I can give you some some anecdotal success stories. It is is a really resounding success and I measure that in a couple of different ways, you know, one is a project, you know, we got through multiple rounds of POC is literally funding the funding, you know, like we were pitching a startup, you know, it was grueling and it was exciting. And then we, you know, we got to an alpha we got the green light to go to a beta. And it's just been so amazing to see this continue to grow and go live. Another really important success factor for me is that, you know, a mission critical system, you know, certain applications in the company they should own, you know, and so even though they engaged us to build this with them. Initially, it was very clear from day one that we were going to help them bring on a team, we were going to transition out. And so, you know, nothing makes me feel better than, you know, getting this up and running, making them successful, and then stepping back and watching them be able to run with it, you know, and, and we'd love to come back in and we hope we get a chance to do so in different ways in the future and I'm confident we will and we're certainly working on many other things but like to be able to build something and walk away and see it thrive is is really awesome. And I feel like that point in particular fulfills one of the promises of open source that's sort of overlooked which is this idea that if you build solutions based on open source principles even if it's just an internal open source model. Right, the idea is it's not just that you're not locked into a vendor but you're not locked into an architecture or an idea or a conception of it. And it should be something learnable it should be something that the the whole team can embrace and continue to maintain right I think it's a really strong measure of a successful project. Yeah, no that's a really good point right you want to recreate the problem internally create your own vendor lock in, you know, with an even smaller pool of resources and developers. So this, there were a couple of things that really sealed the deal for me. And one of them is that teams that are using other tools for other purposes, you know, confluence is one in particular, you know, are using this as the internet and they're saying, Oh man your editor is way better than the confidence editor. It's like yeah because we built on it and we made it better. So we don't have real time collaboration and we don't have integration with all of these things and like, why aren't we using the internet for this could you migrate our content into this and can we like dump this. You know, so that's, you know, that's like a real seal of approval. Another interesting thing and I can't talk much about this is but like, they have certain things that are segmented and firewalled and you know independent. And even these groups, they are like super high security teams are saying, could we clone this, you know, could we somehow run our own instance, you know shared code base so you know we can manage it but you know, and I don't know what's going on behind a lot of insight but it's super cool to hear that. And perhaps my absolute favorite was, because they're really good about, you know, ultimately contributing back to open source communities and you know they're very engaged in open source even if they don't necessarily take credit for it and sometimes it takes organizations a long time to do it. And we were talking about it at one point with the senior executive and he's like, I think we should like productize this and sell this like this should be something that like we make as a company like. Like, we can't give this away. And, and I you know, I don't think he I don't know he was serious. But it was it was so you know that to me was like the biggest compliment of all for them to say like wow this is something that you know we think you know consumers and other companies would love to buy from us. So, at that time there was so much I wanted to talk about. You can check out tag one.com slash well for more about upcoming end of life. We've been doing this really awesome 20 years of Drupal series interviewing really well known leaders in the Drupal community that have helped make Drupal what it is talking about their Drupal journeys and experiences, which is fun and insightful. And of course the the real time collaboration stuff with YGS with tons of content on that as well. Please check it out and of course you can always reach out to Tim or I. I'll try and save some time for questions though. Fantastic thank you Michael. So as a reminder to our audience you can you can go ahead and ask additional questions using the q amp a tab in zoom and we also had a question coming in chat, which is where I'd like to start first, which was which is a great one so. Can we can we get some of the sort of technical meat and potatoes like what what Drupal versions what were some key modules that you use in the PS POC. Were you outright. We talked about integrating with things things like slack was that accomplished through custom modules is that you know what's kind of behind that. Well I guess maybe let's start with sort of Drupal modules. Yeah yeah I'll talk about as much as I can. You know, look I said they're they're huge supporters of open source you know there's a big reason they want to be using open source. If there was an open source module available we would always use it if it made sense I believe the box work. I believe others were working on that in the community and pretty sure I remember. And Anna and some folks collaborating with some third parties on that so I believe we did help with some existing modules. There were some things that didn't exist that we had to create. Certainly you know for proprietary internal things those were all custom modules that will, you know that will not be open sourced. As far as like specific modules, I mean it really. It's the core stuff that you would expect you know I can't think of any like esoteric module like oh my gosh like you know I've never seen that on a project like. You know, the function that didn't exist like the real time collaboration is what we had to build the stuff like you know layout builder and you know web forms and you know that show off the power of Drupal they're already there. And it was you know sort of like those extremes like, you know, leverage as much as Drupal, you know, help improve some contrib only build custom what you have to. Sure, yeah. And, and was that were you working to sort of keep up on these PSEs with like the current latest point releases of Drupal was this during Drupal eight cycle or the early nine cycle as this project was going on. I honestly don't remember if it started on eight and went to nine. It might have I think the earliest. I think the initial POC may have been on eight. The, and that was one of the things that we were like talking about for like timeframes like if we were going to go to alpha, like when do we you know, you know can we get on nine sooner rather than later start schedule and so it was definitely during like the eight to nine transition that like early work was happening. Ultimately, it launched on, you know, the latest nine. Awesome. Okay, very cool. Let's see here so I think we maybe have time for like one more question and I thought I would try and ask one that kind of wrap wrap sort of this. What are the unique circumstances of a project at this scale and above so what is, what would you say is is uniquely different about working with a stakeholder of this science on a project deployed at a literally global scale. Or is it more of the same. Is it is it just the same problems at a larger scale. It's very different. I really do. And I think our success is enlarge. I mean, our team was amazing, you know, their team was amazing, like, but I think it's, it's, there's a lot of like, I don't know what you want to call like a product, you know, like product management, you know that that you do and I think that the product manager for the owner, the internet, you know, his, he wrapped his head around like what the system does and how it works and how he engaged with, you know, such a large company of stakeholders and, you know, these relationships that he's had and like, you know, like, putting together like the plan and winning people over, like, you know, the strategy behind that, you know, the positioning like ushering this across every stage from idea to budgets, you know, pull, I mean, the scale at which they were operating was insane. You know, and like I remember one meeting like, and what I love is they were so like, they literally treated as if we were like, you know, at the company on their team like it never once you know it was like such a partnership. I remember like he would show me oh here's the pitch deck I'm going to give to my executive team next week like let's go through it and you know give me your feedback and remember one day he's like oh yeah so hey you know we're starting this whole marketing promotional campaign and I'm like wait what it literally had like in parallel with everything else that we were doing. He literally had like videos being created and like like he was marketing and promoting a proof of concept as a fully fledged product out to user groups that we were doing like regular demos to I mean like the level of orchestration and management that went on to just give this, you know, legs to kind of get to life. I don't think most people on the project even got to see what was going on there and it was, it was really mind blowing to me that like, you know, we played a really important critical role in this project but there was so much going on. Yeah, so to me I think there's the lessons to take away from that are, as you say there's something critical to really strong product management on the inside of the organization of working with and that's a lesson for members of our audience who are you know end users of Drupal who are maybe looking at a large scale project of this sort or evaluating Drupal to be used in a large scale project, but also for teams or developers or whoever else about the strength of having well defined requirements and well defined process and touch points, and really strong representation of users I think, and I think that's certainly something that I'm taking away from this conversation that's really powerful. Besides, perhaps the, the need for incredible real time collaboration tools and checking out yjs in some more detail so with that though I think that's pretty much all the time we have. I do want to thank everyone again for joining us. We do really appreciate you taking the time in your day to understand the story. Again, for my part my name is Tim Lennon has been at the Drupal Association. We'd love to see you at the upcoming Drupal con in Portland at the end of April you can find information at events dot Drupal dot org, and you can join us on Drupal dot org slash association to learn about our programs and how you can support the Drupal community. And with that I'll hand it to you Michael to sign off. Awesome Tim, thank you so much for having me everyone who joined us thank you for hanging out through the full hour here. I love talking about this I really hope that you guys learned something from it are excited, or as excited as I am about real time collaboration and all the cool things that Drupal can do. Please don't hesitate to reach out to Tim or I with questions and make sure you check out triple con. Awesome. Thank you very much everybody. We hope you have a great rest of your day. For those of you in the US enjoy Thanksgiving coming up soon, and the Drupal Association will see you again.