Last updated by grafixfarm on Fri, 2009-08-28 23:36
As the driving force behind web development at Solomon Telekom Company Limited, it gives me a lot of opportunity to initiate open source projects. The first drive to move into the FOSS world was our initiative to deploy our company intranet using Drupal 5. The combination with CCK, Views and Webforms allowed us to replicate many of our business processes easily. Some newer processes were implemented to streamline some existing business processes and conform to current web practises. All in all, it has been a "small" revolution but significant in a way.
Our Telekom has moved to the next stage by deploying its current corporate website on www.telekom.com.sb using Drupal 6 and for the first time in Solomon Islands combining the power of Drupal with Ubercart. The "soft" launch occurred on 27th August, 3:25am with a formal launch to follow soon. I am naturally excited as it has been a largely self driven initiative with reliance on the greater Drupal community on making this project successful. The forums, groups, tutorials, handbooks and blogs were a consistent guide. Kudos to the community.
Our move to Ubercart will introduce a locally driven ecommerce site that has been largely non-existent in the Solomon Islands. Our initiative is not the first but it will be the first that will be backed by local developers and consistently pushed to acceptance by the Our Telekom clientele and the Solomon Islanders.
The website currently runs on IIS6 on Windows Server 2003. Memory consumption and competition for resources on the web server will be a major issue. Having said that we are deploying a newer server with more grunt running RHEL 5.1 and Apache. I am hopeful that a lot of our IIS "blues" and many workarounds will be a thing of the past.
Google Analytics has reported a sudden surge in hits on the website. This is largely due to the development team's efforts to place focus and greater visibility on our products and services. For the very first time in the company's experience, our customers are able to look and see for themselves what products and services we provide. I think that has been the major drive behind the upsurge in traffic. Here it also answers one of our challenges "to generate local internet traffic".
The development team was a collaboration between our Marketing and the Information Services department. I headed the technical team consisting of my assistant, Jestina Mesepitu and initially a contracted staff, Stennet Hekomae who has since left the company. The non-technical team was headed by our former Assistant Manager Marketing Rachel Rahii who has since left the company. Christopher Kuper became our Ubercart "guru" and Mary Naumai was responsible for translating our business processes giving the technical team an opportunity to understand how to translate this to the "Drupal" way. Isabella Kaoa was responsible for uploading and developing content. All in all, the concept of teamwork was finally put into practise at Our Telekom and the dividend was the successful launch of this site. Most features are still disabled, some Ubercart functionality, until we make a formal launch.
The experience was very rewarding for all in the development team. Personally I can vouch for the power of Drupal. Here is a Pacific Island country far out in Oceania but it too can be part of the Drupal community and embrace its ideals.
Suggestions and ideas for improvements are always welcome.