Not only will the retirement of Drupal 7 impact the organizations that use it to develop and run their digital platforms, it can impact the users who rely on these digital experiences.

Everything you need to know about Drupal 7’s End-of-Life

Performance, productivity and security are the most important technology considerations required for the future of work.

Empower Teams with Digital Tools

NortonLifeLock’s online user community is a vital resource for customers. NortonLifeLock was early to embrace a robust user community, and had worked hard to develop and maintain the community’s value. That value came with a risk however, as opportunistic content creators began targeting the NortonLifeLock user audience. The risk of bad actors targeting and subsequently devaluing any online community, is a gradual and measurable threat.

The risk to a security company’s online community? That’s a PR and perception crisis.

Traditional community security either attacked each issue on a case by case basis, or utilized programmatic solutions. A case-by-case approach wasn’t a feasible solution. Not at the scale a community the size of NortonLifeLock’s demanded. Unfortunately programmatic solutions were off the table too. In the advent of GDPR compliance neither of the leading software candidates, Mollom or Akismet, were prepared to meet compliance standards.

After exhausting other options, BKJ Digital built a custom solution that attacked the issue with exponential effect. Using advanced data analytics, BKJ’s security solution identified critical patterns and trends among negative user behavior and content, within the community’s larger database of users and content.

Based on these indicators, the software empowered community managers to immediately quarantine massive blocks of content and user accounts. Bad operators could be swept up, and their content eliminated, in one-click.

Learn how BKJ made a security company more secure

NortonLifeLock’s online community was a huge success. One of the challenges any robust user community faces is discerning the difference between engaged and passionate users, and opportunists seeking to use the community as a content platform. As a security company, the perception stakes were even higher for NortonLifeLock to successfully manage user behavior.

Avoiding more drastic solutions like “killing commenting” that diminish the value of a community, BKJ built community tools that empowered community managers to manage questionable users, while defending the integrity of NortonLifeLock’s valuable online community.

NortonLifeLock's massive user community attracts a passionate customer base. Unfortunately it also attracted a population of content opportunists. That is, until BKJ Digital built the administrative and security tools needed to make one-click community management possible.


Shutting down bad actors in a single click

NortonLifeLock Community

Molecular Devices' sales funnel was interrupted. For an organization providing complex hardware solutions to thousands of laboratories around the world, a disruption of this size within their sales process threatened the future of the organization. The issue was the critical and recurring failure of the lead generation form on the enterprise website. The lead generation form and the website were consistently identified by the company's marketing leadership as the primary conversion channel for sales. And the lights kept going out.

A previous technology partner had constructed the website, and the form, where the pervasive issue developed. In the wake of that partner's departure, another technology consulting firm was brought in to diagnose and correct the issue. When that partner similarly failed to find the critical issue, Molecular Devices was running out of time and options. Reaching out to former colleagues and partners for their recommendations for a technology partner that could jump into the middle of the fire and put it out, a contact at Symantec quickly recommended BKJ Digital.

Thanks to BKJ's forensic approach to troubleshooting the issue was identified readily. The problem was the form's integration with Salesforce. An error in the API integration was the critical point of failure. Unless that issue was properly identified and remedied, the form was perpetually doomed to fail again and again.

BKJ was able to spot the issue right away for two reasons inherent to their unique approach and qualifications.

First, because BKJ is steeped in engineering massive, complex software solutions at enterprise scale, an API is an API. Salesforce is a particularly robust and complex system to integrate elegantly. Thanks to BKJ's experience however, even more complex API integrations are less daunting challenges to solve.

While that experience is valuable, what makes BKJ unique is where the team's experience lives. It lives on the front lines of client services, within the expertise of the BKJ principals and team members who lead client engagements. It's not hidden behind layers of client services infrastructure. Or behind the lines of account managers, solution architects, and project managers that inhabit larger consulting organizations. BKJ's experience exists at ground level. As a result, Molecular Devices' issues weren't filtered through layers and layers of consulting bureaucracy.

The team members who took the initial call when Molecular Devices explained their issues, were the very same team members who forensically plunged into the code. They were the same team members who had previously done similar critical work over the past decade, with a host of clients across a massive variety of issues. BKJ's value lives at the fingertips of the organization.

Beyond repairing the Salesforce integration, BKJ was also able to pivot immediately into improving the UX of the newly stable lead generation form turning a weakness into a strength, quickly. Damage control became a forensic diagnosis, turned into a solution, and evolved into optimization in days.

Discover BKJ’s forensic approach to troubleshooting

Molecular Devices' lead generation form on their website was their most important sales avenue, and it was broken. Worse yet, two other agencies had attempted to address and remedy the situation, and failed.

BKJ's forensic approach to troubleshooting allowed them to spot the issue fairly immediately, thanks to the depth of their experience working with complex API integrations.

Molecular Devices' lead generation form was their most important sales avenue, and it was broken. Worse yet, two other agencies had attempted to address and remedy the situation, and failed.

Fixing the seemingly unfixable

Molecular Devices Lead Generation

Symantec publishes a massive amount of content. While thought leadership from Symantec’s Security and Research teams is a foundation for the organization’s global marketing efforts, other groups within the organization similarly need to publish and update content rapidly. From podcasts and blog posts, to original intellectual property and industry research, to GDPR compliance material, Symantec was consistently under deadline to publish a wide variety of content, and demand far outpaced speed of delivery.

The gap between publishing needs and publishing capabilities inherently led to opportunity costs and inefficiency, but there were profound existential risks as well. GDPR regulatory law required Symantec to update and produce compliance materials. These publishing delays could have material impact on the bottom line.

Publishing content required changes to Symantec’s Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) CMS. In order to publish anything Symantec publishers needed assistance from the enterprise I.T. organization. Every piece of content that needed to be published, became a ticket for the I.T. team. A team already operating at an incredibly high velocity to meet Symantec’s other software and technology needs. Marketers were falling behind, developers were snowed in with tickets, and the stakes were getting higher.

Working alongside Symantec’s Marketing and I.T. organizations, BKJ Digital designed and built a Content Hub solution that put publishing back in the hands of the publishers. BKJ constructed a publishing platform from a carefully selected multi-use CMS that would not only empower publishers, but would also syndicate content back to AEM, retaining platform integrity.

The Content Hub was built to offer each publishing team a unique user interface and user experience based on their content needs. The podcasting team, blogging team, product, security, and research were each armed with the publishing tools they needed to improve speed of delivery and publishing frequency. Visibility was improved among teams as automated updates notified users of newly produced content. And the GDPR documentation? Formerly laboriously published and replaced as a pdf, the compliance docs are now updated immediately, digitally, reducing the publishing lag time to zero.

Learn how BKJ built a portal that enabled personalization

Symantec marketers couldn’t independently publish content as needed. Any edits to their CMS required coordinating that effort through the enterprise IT organization, which was too burdened with other responsibilities to meet demand.

Extending AEM through a multi-use CMS, BKJ built a content hub that gave marketers the tools they needed to publish content themselves, increasing speed and reducing effort to publish.

Symantec's partners needed to get content and assets based on their specific partnership level. But building a robust resource through Adobe Experience Manager was complex, to say the least.

Decreasing technical debt while increasing content accessibility

Symantec Self-publishing System

Symantec’s channel marketers needed to get the right content and assets into the right partners’ hands frictionlessly. From logos and photo assets, to data sheets, videos, and pitch decks, the Symantec channel marketers and their partners orchestrate a huge variety of moving parts. Building out a massive account management organization to service these needs directly was too costly to consider. An automated, personalized, and intuitive digital solution was needed.

Symantec’s enterprise platform Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), while robust, presented a challenge to Marketing quickly spinning up a digital solution. Building software in AEM demanded the skills and expertise of Symantec’s internal IT organization. An IT organization that was already in chronically high demand.

Marketing could choose to take their spot in the IT queue and build a solution in AEM, but the drawback would be the time and effort invested in serving partners’ needs -- one request at a time -- until the solution was built out.

Luckily BKJ Digital was able to offer an alternative.

Building the partner portal outside of AEM, in an open source CMS, ensured that the Marketing organization was able to self-serve and keep the huge inventory of marketing assets current and up-to-date without help from an outside organization. Marketing could extend and evolve the portal with minimal effort, within their own team. The IT organization would no longer need to worry about building the portal within AEM. More importantly, the IT organization was also freed from endlessly supporting any and all future changes to the portal within AEM as well. BKJ was able to dial up Marketing’s autonomous control of the portal, while reducing IT waste by eliminating exposure to endless support tickets.

Within the CMS, BKJ crafted a user experience that thoughtfully organized content and assets for partners. The content and assets were significantly more accessible and operable when intuitively organized to meet users’ expectations.

Each partner required a unique set of content and assets based on their level of access, geographic location, and other credentials. The challenge remained to precisely identify user needs, automatically, so every user found exactly the content they needed, without having to wade through the content they didn’t need.

Thanks to BKJ’s experience within Symantec’s technical infrastructure, the team was aware of how the database within Symantec’s Salesforce integration was structured. All of the user information BKJ needed in order to build software that automated the diagnosis of distinct users’ needs, lived on the other end of Symantec’s existing Salesforce API. By connecting the Salesforce API to the user login process, the portal was able to diagnose a partner’s needs and specific credentials instantly, upon login.

A hallmark of a successful BKJ project is a win-win solution for a client’s IT and Marketing organizations. The Symantec partner portal is no exception to that rule. BKJ’s work resulted in a partner portal that not only decreased the technical debt within the IT organization as planned, but also reduced the active administration of partner needs within the channel marketing team, improving efficiency in both areas.

See how smart user experience design solves partner access challenges

Symantec partners need content and assets based on their specific partnership level, but building a robust resource through Adobe Experience Manager was complex, requiring the IT organization’s help

BKJ built the Partner Toolkit, a portal built thru an open source CMS and in parallel with the AEM platform, that allowed for the kind of personalization and user experience that partners, and Symantec channel marketers, needed.

Channel managers needed to easily get the right marketing assets to internal and external partners, but faced complexities of distinct user access requirements and system limitations. Everything from social content to pitch decks needed to be geographically targeted and partner centric.

Digital Transformation Examples - Resources & Whitepapers | Bkj Digital

Resources

Blog

Everything you need to know about Drupal 7’s End-of-Life

Empower Teams with Digital Tools

Case Studies

Shutting down bad actors in a single click

Fixing the seemingly unfixable

Decreasing technical debt while increasing content accessibility

Enabling access to marketing assets through a partner portal

White Papers

Structural Tune-Ups: The Enterprise Marketer's Guide to Overcoming Barriers to Market

Reduce Your Reputational Risk: A Guide to Mitigate Marketing Blindspots Associated with PII