Symantec Connect is an enterprise class, community-driven, social business support and information portal for Symantec products, offering users of Symantec’s deep catalog of applications and services a platform to interact with one another and Symantec employees through rich web-based tools. Connect enables the rapid publishing of information about the day-to-day use of Symantec products through key community-centric features which facilitate the customer’s ability to:

  • Ask the community for help with issues and flag solutions when they are posted for easy discovery in the forums
  • Suggest and vote on product enhancements
  • Publish helper applications and scripts as community downloads
  • Publish user-submitted screencast videos for enhanced knowledge sharing
  • Build online/offline product centric user groups with events, private content publishing and messaging in the groups
  • Keep up with content on a variety of topics within the IT and security-related fields through articles and blog entries
  • Enjoy a highly qualified community experience enabled by a suite of Symantec employee moderation, organization, and publishing controls.

All of these features also empower Symantec employees to quickly publish official versions of forum discussions, blog entries, articles, events, downloads, and videos while moderating and vetting content, helping steer the community in the right direction.

Why Drupal was chosen: 

After considering the landscape of both proprietary and open-source solutions, Symantec decided to use Drupal as a foundation for their community initiative. Symantec recognized Drupal to be offering:

  • a wealth of out of the box CMS and social media features and functionality
  • the ability to scale for high usage sites
  • the theme and development flexibility to customize the user experience quickly without the typical lag they had experienced requesting new features from proprietary vendors
  • a recognized developer community from which to draw quality development talent

Symantec’s internal UX team even installed and configured rough prototypes in Drupal leveraging the vast library of existing contrib modules to experiment with various use cases for the upcoming project. This ability to rapidly create functional prototypes further cemented the choice of Drupal as the platform for development.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

A Brief History

Symantec, founded in 1982, is one of the world's largest software companies with more than 17,500 employees in more than 40 countries. The company provides both security and storage and systems management solutions. Their customer base includes consumers, small businesses, and some of the world's largest global organizations. The company's phenomenal growth can be attributed to a combination of market acceptance and strategic acquisitions.

In early 2008, Symantec's Customer Experience team began crafting a roadmap designed to consolidate several existing support and discussion sites into a consistent, best-of-breed community offering. The goals of this consolidation were to:

Give Symantec customers a single point of contact where they could engage with the company's support, marketing, and product management teams,
Draw on other customers experience and expertise,
Reduce the support and licensing costs of maintaining a collection of disparate community offerings.

Technical specifications

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Solr allowed faceted searching of forum results to indicate their state in the search results.

Community contributions: 

n/a

Project team: 

The project was structured to allow Symantec Customer Experience team to provide input on the design and planning of the site while collaborating with a group of Drupal experts. Symantec’s internal team is augmented with Drupal expertise in the key areas needed for successful Drupal development.

  • WebWise Solutions Inc. leads Connect’s project development and is the principle contact on the project providing long-standing expertise in Drupal-centric project management and user community development. WebWise handles all day-to-day operations and oversight of everything from server deployment to administering the rewards system and offering a first line of customer support for the site’s users, all of which enables Symantec to focus on utilizing Connect to serve their customers instead of having to worry about maintaining the platform.
  • Tabs & Spaces Inc. brings the heavy lifting of custom module development creating upwards of 50 custom modules to augment and extend Drupal to meet the unique needs of building a customer support community around a deep catalog of products and services.
  • Jeffrey Dalton Design Inc. adds the “hot sauce” of user experience centered design and theme work leveraging Drupal’s powerful theme system to tailor the interface to the specific needs of the community. After the initial launch the redesign process allowed Jeffrey Dalton Design to fully invest in re-visioning the theme and leveraging user feedback collected throughout the initial months of Connects operation. During this process the Symantec Corporation even went through a brand change of their own which was easily rolled into the new theme.
  • Tag1 Consulting delivers the performance and scalability tuning that is essential for Drupal sites with millions of users. With multiple layers of content caching in multi-server configurations, world class scalability expertise allows Symantec Connect to continue it’s rapid growth in a high demand environment.

This augmented team approach allows for rapid expansion of area-specific development expertise when new features and functionality are requested while minimizing Symantec’s development overhead.

Sectors: 
Social Networking
Technology

Comments

konrad1811’s picture

Wow Symantec went into Drupal...
Nice!

zgos’s picture

Yes, very glad to see more and more compay/website to share their expicrence in deploy drupal. Good job.

Benaro’s picture

Seeing this project has confirmed to me the power of drupal cms and reginger my interest to learn to develop a theme like the one used in this project.
I'm conversnt with CSS to some extent but just not able to hit drupal elemets with CSS codes.Any help?

jsequeiros’s picture

Great job, I like the presentation of news in the form of accordion.

lekofev’s picture

that is a great job, and the menu is really nice.

davidhunter’s picture

Hi Lee - thanks for posting this.
The site is very well done.

Can you provide more information on the modules and method you used to integrate the Social and Community aspects of this site ?

The structure you are using to engage the public, and create a knowledge base is exactly what I am looking for in a new Social Collaboration site. I have looked at DrupalCommons but as I'm sure you know is still in development under Drupal7.

Any detail you could provide re: the Communities, Forums, and especially the Mobile integration would be appreciated.

JohnLinux’s picture

biggups... great site, more proud of drupal

salimshaik’s picture

Nice to hear, Drupal People having Bright Future..

salimshaik’s picture

Nice to hear Symantic choosen Drupal.

chowtrann’s picture

i usually experience serious lag time but i can honestly say i dont see much at the site.
is this because of drupal or the DB ?

Sandip Choudhury’s picture

Please write in details, why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen?

Sandip Choudhury
http://hostingultraso.com

salimshaik’s picture

Hi all,

how can i create above funcationality in drupal 7, which module it suits for this funcationality.
Please let me now! (welcome find share image slider)