PayPal - Intranet
PayPal was facing the problem of low employee engagement on their central intranet site which was built on top of Sharepoint. They wanted to upgrade it so that they could have modern UI/UX for employees and a better publishing experience for the editors along with enterprise search capabilities.
Modern UI/UX
To provide user experience that is not confined by limitations of Drupal theming, we decided to create the site using headless Drupal. The front-end was created using Node.js and AngularJS. Front-end commuicated with the back-end Drupal using APIs, that were created using the Services module.
Publishing Experience
In an effort to create best-in-class publishing exprience, we decided to use headless Drupal even to create and edit news stories. We integrated Medium editor on the publishing UI so that the editors got true WYSIWYG experience. All form validation was done on the client side using AngularJS. Editors were so impressed by the UI that they mentioned that this was the best publishing UI that they have ever seen, and is much better than even Wordpress UI.
Search
We used Elasticsearch to replace PayPal's internal Sharepoint based search. The challenge was that we had to index PayPal's all internal sites that were hosted on multiple technologies including Drupal, Node.js and Sharepoint. Since Drupal provides integration modules with other technologies, we decided to use it as a central search server. All content to be searched got stored in Drupal and then was indexed in Elasticsearch. We enhanced Drupal's sharepoint module to crawl Sharepoint based sites using SOAP and to retrieve content. We also created a custom API so that any other site, whether it be hosted on Drupal or Node.js could connect to this central search server and push its data into it. Once all the data got indexed into Elasticsearch, it was retrieved by Node.js any time an employee searched for a keyword on the central intranet site.
BACKGROUND & GOALS
PayPal was facing the problem of low employee engagement on their central Sharepoint-based intranet site. They wanted to upgrade it so that they could have modern UI/UX for employees and a better publishing experience for the editors. They also wanted to be able to search all their internal sites using this new UI experience.
SOLUTION
We worked along with PayPal's developers to redefine the intranet experience. Using headless Drupal concept, employee facing UI/UX was created with Node.js and AngularJS and the back-end publishing data store was created in Drupal. Publishing UI was created using AngularJS and utilized Medium editor. Elasticsearch was used to improve the search experience.
RESULTS
Employee engagement on the intranet increased by over 60% following launch of the new site. The team got kudos from the VP of Corporate Communications. Editors termed the publishing experience as the best they have seen.
