Conrad Electronic: Intranet on Drupal

Opis projekta

Note: ongoing project

Conrad is an international consortium, with branches and distributors in most European countries. The assortment consists of about 150,000 different products divided over the following categories: Computing & Home office, Multimedia, Hobbies, Home & Garden, Tools, Components, Batteries/Power, and Car. Conrad sells to both companies (B2B) as well as consumers (B2C) with a multi-channel sales strategy which is focused on the Internet.

Conrad representatives approached MontenaSoft in 2011 with an idea of creating simple and yet powerful Intranet platform for facilitating internal communication inside local European branches, as well as developing cross-border cooperation hub regarding organizational and marketing issues. A Drupal solution was in focus from the very start because of Drupal’s vast set of features and possibility to easily expand a Drupal application in future in whatever direction a Conrad’s company Intranet will develop.

The main idea from the start was to use one of the existing Drupal distributions to make a feature rich platform possible in short time and on budget,. The Drupal Commons distribution, sponsored by Acquia, is based on Drupal Core with set of pre-configured and ready-to-use Drupal modules. It is aimed to facilitate social business models and is an excellent choice when it comes to creating websites that have focus on organizational aspects of web community activities. Intranet activities of a company with branches in different countries fits very well to the model.

Few adaptations needed however to be made, reflecting Conrad’s internal business processes and organization. The usage of Organic Groups (OG) for organizing system users in groups that should share knowledge was enhanced by providing additional Drupal theming and information layout reflecting local branches of Conrad. To facilitate information search with multilevel faceted search, Apache Solr solution was added to system. Besides, security needed to be tuned, as well as large number of small issues reflecting wording, site organization, information layout and site workflow. In addition, support for chat was added to the platform, as well as installing multilingual support. Training regarding features of this modified Drupal Commons distribution was also provided for Conrad representatives that will take administrative roles in the system.

With Drupal as their Intranet platform, Conrad International is well-equipped to start supporting their business model with a social business solution in years to come. MontenaSoft is excited about the possibilities that such interesting project have and will continuously adapt, develop and optimize accompanying set of applications in future, as well as provide support and training for Conrad employees.