BACKGROUND
Harvard University has thousands of websites hosted in a number of different environments. And the number of systems, and the cost to support them, grows every year.

The Harvard Web Publishing Initiative was created in 2012 to offer web publishing services built on the OpenScholar Drupal platform. The goals of the department are to leverage Harvard’s strengths in digital communication, web development, and service delivery. We work with departments across the University to add services and new functionality while making the platform easier to use in a scalable and sustainable way.

After starting with ten pilot projects, HWP has grown to serve hundreds of departments (and counting). All along the way, feedback from our user community has been essential to continuing development of our platform and services to better serve the University community.

TARGET AUDIENCE
This discussion is aimed at project managers, business analysts, and people who need to support and deploy large-scale Drupal environments.

TOPICS
- How the OpenScholar software began as a Faculty web publishing tool and grew into a platform that serves departments, centers, student groups, etc.
- Managing and meeting the needs of our diverse Platform users
- Our ongoing 6-week feature release cycle, how and why it works
- Our commitment to our users experience and web accessibility
- How we support a very large and growing number of OpenScholar users with Platform trainings, documentation and user community involvement.
- Pros & Cons using one platform for a disparate user base