We were asked by The Royal College Of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) to migrate their website from an aging EpiServer CMS to the latest version of Umbraco, along with implementing their new design language and a complete architectural restructure.
The aim was to modernise RCOG’s site to use the latest CMS technologies (Umbraco) to ensure innovative digital services could be created to meet the needs of users, whilst also ensuring continued support and security updates from Umbraco whilst moving from their old EpiServer platform.
In addition to this, more modern technologies would be incorporated through the architectural stack including Single Sign On (SSO) Authentication and a more API driven architecture, allowing for easier reuse of data across different applications. Good communication was key to this project as many 3rd party services were being utilised, including implementing and understanding a supplied design language, hooking the site into a new external events system, a members area and an advanced faceted search platform . To facilitate this, we held several technical workshops as part of the initial discovery phase to ensure that all parties understood their responsibilities, providing swagger API definition documents which allowed the various teams to work independently of each other.
What we did
- A full project discovery phase which included multiple technical workshops with 3rd party suppliers to ensure that RCOG’s requirements could be met and that all parties knew their roles and responsibilities. These were confirmed by creating, reviewing and signing off on Swagger API definition documents.
- Created a complete set of wireframe documents which outlined all required site templates, components and functionality. These were based on the provided user research and analysis of the current site whilst being cognisant of the technical constraints flagged in the initial technical workshops.
- Extended the provided creative designs to cover the new lower-level templates and components outlines in the wireframes and not originally covered.
- Development of the core Umbraco CMS and setup, including page templates, components, media uploads, taxonomy driven lists, news listings, analytics tracking and bespoke submission forms.
- Integrated Umbraco into Azure B2C Single Sign On Solution (SSO), restricting page content to certain user types, exchanging data with 3rd party members area and events system, full external faceted search platform.
- Fully browser and accessibility tested to WCAG AA 2.1 and deployed to external hosting solutions.
- All pulled together by our lean project management approach – a well balanced mix of agile and waterfall, to ensure the project ran smoothly and was deployed ahead of schedule and in budget.
Take a look rcog.org.uk
