Wheaton College contacted Sanmita after the sudden departure of their webmaster, which created urgency to their needs. There were some 180 sites on WordPress, a site on Drupal, and another site on a different CMS. This was a total of over 5,000 pages, by 700 contributors which was now unmanaged.

The WordPress site needed safe plugin updates and support. Their Luminis (now Ellucian) needed upgrades, and all three platforms; WordPress, Luminis, and Banner needed to be integrated. Also, the Trustees had a directory on Drupal that needed support.

Client also needed help in shortlisting and interviewing potential webmaster candidates and making recommendations.

• Massive and highly complex site with little documentation
• Upcoming Luminis deadline required immediate resources
• Student portal needed to pull correct data from varying sources
• Address client’s concern to quickly update and edit many plugins

We started the engagement with an in-depth discovery of the client systems, primarily WordPress ecosystem and documenting key information e.g. active sites vs inactive sites, servers, login/passwords, active vs inactive plugins. We also checked and documented integration points between student information system and other enterprise systems.

In collaboration with both the enterprise IT team and central web development team, we were able to solve key challenges very effectively. Having the system documentation in hand helped all team members to execute tasks efficiently and accurately. We removed inactive WordPress plugins and updated active plugins to enhance system security. We also created a centralized plugin repository to ease the system management in the future.

• Access to validated system documentation reduced the on-boarding time of the new webmaster from 6 weeks to 2 weeks, a savings of about $7,000.
• Creating a stable WordPress ecosystem reduced the security and performance incidents, which required constant IT attention in the past.
• Ellucian Luminis upgrade was performed successfully before the due date set by the vendor.
• Moving the single Drupal site to WordPress infrastructure allowed better manageability of the web platform and reduced the cost required to manage the web infrastructure by 35%.
• Testing and fixing the integration issues in the Student Information system reduced frequent content issues.