Organizations leveraging Drupal need to consider the ongoing maintenance and upgrades required to keep Drupal secure and enable your authors with new features and modules.

Patching Drupal to prevent vulnerabilities

Regardless of the major version of Drupal, it’s important to continue to quickly apply patches associated with security bulletins. These security advisories are put out by the Drupal community security team and identify potential risks in the core Drupal project.  The release schedule outlined by the Drupal community addresses both bug fixes and security vulnerabilities in your current major version.

Managed hosting platforms for Drupal, like Acquia, offer this level of patching as an automated part of the maintenance.  If you are managing your own Drupal hosting architecture, monitoring of Drupal security bulletins and a cadence for application must be set up as a part of your site maintenance schedule.  If your site is utilizing a minimum of Drupal 8, the use of Composer as a package and dependency manager can help your team make this process more efficient.

Updating Drupal major versions

The current major version of Drupal is Drupal 9, released in June 2020. Implementations that launched before that date are likely on Drupal 7 or Drupal 8, which are both scheduled for end of life by the Drupal community.  Given the need for Drupal implementations to stay current to address security vulnerabilities, working within a supported version of Drupal is critical.

Drupal 7, first released back in 2011, will continue under support until November 2022, a decision that the community made to recognize the impact of COVID-19 on organization plans.  While Drupal 7 sites will be supported longer than Drupal 8 sites, modules and themes for Drupal 7 are significantly different than Drupal 8 implementations. This increases the complexity of upgrades and can limit organizations with only modules and integrations built before the community began moving to Drupal 8.

Drupal 8, first released in 2015, will reach end of life in November 2021, due to a dependence on Symphony 3, which the Drupal community cannot control.  Drupal 8 was a major shift in architecture for Drupal with the intention of making it easier to build, author and maintain these sites. As a part of this new upgrade plan, Drupal 8 sites are built in a way that can be easily updated over time to stay compliant with an eventual move to Drupal 9.  Sites that utilize modules and custom code that in Drupal 8 that has been approved for Drupal 9 have a very easy migration path to Drupal 9.

Why upgrade to Drupal 9?

Ongoing Support

The primary benefit of Drupal 9 is ongoing support. Drupal 9 will be supported through November 2023, ensuring that your implementation will continue to be supported into the future.  Drupal 10 is currently estimated to be released in 2022, giving your organization plenty of time to prepare.  Drupal 9 continues to make upgrade and maintenance easier and more automated, reducing the work to stay current on your Drupal version in the future.

Component-based Architecture

Depending on the version and implementation you had on Drupal previously, a migration to Drupal 9 may be a chance to implement a true component system for your Drupal site, rather than the more traditional field and page based architecture.  Through Layout Builder, Paragraphs or Acquia Site Studio, your authors can utilize a toolbox of available components to build pages, rather than working within existing themed page structures.  This ensure that your site can continue to evolve and change in ways the original design may not have expected.

If you need help figuring out if you are ready to upgrade to Drupal 9, check out our Drupal Upgrade Readiness Assessment.

With Acquia Engage 2020 underway, the morning started with some exciting news about Acquia Drupal Cloud, but there are some big new things coming to the Acquia Marketing Cloud as well. The Acquia Marketing Cloud is the suite of tools that enable extended marketing functionality like personalization and marketing automation.

Last year, the big announcement was the acquisition of AgilOne, which has now become Acquia CDP.  This year’s announcements make it clear that the roadmap is the further integration of these products with a single profile shared across them all.

Marketing Cloud Enhancements

Unified Real-Time Profiles

The major enhancements to the marketing cloud focus on centralizing data in Acquia CDP.  The unification of profiles from Acquia Personalization and Acquia Campaign bring that data into one location.

Universal Segments

Once you leverage Acquia CDP to bring together disparate sets of data, de-duping and using machine learning to resolve identity matching issues, Acquia CDP now has built in segments that allow users to quickly start to group users to understand behavior and design strategies.

360° Marketing Analytics

While it’s important to bring all of this information together into a single view of the user or customer, we need a solution that will deliver insights about customers and roll up trends happening on the site.  The 360° marketing analytics helps to equip your team with information about segments and users.

Predictive Sends Model

Continuing to leverage machine learning, the new predictive models within the CDP allow for a better “next best action” in that user’s journey.  Rather than pouring over data with a data scientist, the AI within Acquia CDP delivers the next step quickly to maximize campaign efficacy.

COVID-19 Analysis Dashboard

An example of how all these pieces come together is a COVID-19 Analysis Dashboard that looks at the ways customer habits shift offline and online as the pandemic progresses.  Without a single view of the customer, both online and offline, this would not be possible.

Future of the Marketing Cloud

An example that Dries outlined in his talk was an abandoned cart campaign that is smart enough to recognize that the user bought the product offline and instead move on to other campaign strategies around upselling.  I personally see these types of things all the time, even when my purchases are online.  I find myself being retargeted to or having products suggested that I have just recently purchased from those very retailers.  In our strides to improve the consumer experience, I find I expect you to have enough data to deliver the best possible experience. Organizations without that type of platform cannot compete with new consumer expectations.

While conferences are not safe this year with COVID-19, Acquia Engage has gone virtual with an online event.  While Acquia Engage is usually a great opportunity to get to know Acquia employees, customers and partners in person, this year can still deliver on new ideas coming in the Acquia platform.

As Acquia has expanded into an open Digital Experience Platform (DXP), their products have been split into two areas of focus.  The Drupal Cloud is the suite of tools that enhance site building in Drupal and Marketing Cloud is the suite of tools that enable extended marketing functionality like personalization and marketing automation.

Acquia Drupal Cloud Enhancements

Dries Buytaert (the founder of Drupal) started off the conference with some exciting announcements around the Drupal Cloud.  These enhancements focus on enabling Acquia customers to more quickly build out site experiences in Drupal and reduce the maintenance and upgrade costs long-term.

Acquia Migrate

While the Drupal community has made it very easy to migrate from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9, those on earlier versions of Drupal (or not on Drupal at all) will find that the typical project to get to Drupal 9 is more like implementation than it is like upgrade.  Acquia Migrate can make the upgrade process for Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 five times faster and Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 twice as fast.  In addition, there are even solutions to migrate non-Drupal sites into Drupal 9.

Acquia Cloud IDE

Setting up a local copy of Drupal for development can be complex. There are multiple requirements to run Drupal and typically development tools have been different for developers on windows, mac and linux. The Acquia Cloud IDE allows a developer to spin up a full brower-based development environment in 60 seconds that is fully integrated into the Acquia Cloud.

Acquia CMS

Acquia has been behind the work necessary to allow enterprise organizations to leverage Drupal, through platform support, solutions like Lightning and low-code solutions like Acquia Site Studio.  In the continuation of that evolution, Acquia is creating a specialized distribution of Drupal to provide out of the box capabilities and pre-installed integrations with other Acquia products. It’s still Drupal, but with additional enterprise solutions to support your needs.

Site Studio Page Builder

Acquia Site Studio (formerly Cohesion) moves Drupal from a page-based system to a true component-based CMS that allows users to build up experiences using a toolbox of components. One challenge of Site Studio has been that the user interface for creating these is not quite WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). The Page Builder enhancement to Site Studio delivers that author-friendly WYSIWYG experience when dragging and dropping components onto the page.

Acquia Cloud Next

Acquia was early in bringing Drupal to the cloud and enabling the level of scaling that can be very challenging on-premise.  Acquia Cloud Next will take that scalability to the next level by moving Acquia hosting to a fully containerized model, apparently leveraging Kubernetes.  This “under the hood” enhancement to Acquia Cloud will allow for faster sites that are more scalable and more resilient.

The Future of Acquia Drupal Cloud

Overall, I’m excited about these enhancements in the Drupal Cloud. It’s clear that Acquia’s roadmap has been focused on the very things that needed the most attention to continue to excel beyond other DXP solutions and make it easier for partners and customers to build out experiences in Drupal. Dries even hinted at enhancements coming to Acquia Search, which has desperately needed it.  I’m looking forward to what Acquia Drupal Cloud is going to enable.

More to come in the releases and roadmap for the Acquia Marketing Cloud.

Even a few years ago, I would have told you that there is no place in healthcare for open source technologies like Drupal. The marketing technology within healthcare has largely been dominated by Microsoft-enabled technologies and proprietary systems supported by a single company.  However, Drupal has become a key tool in the toolbox of healthcare marketers and here are a few of the trends driving adoption.

On The Cloud with Acquia

The ubiquity of the cloud, across all types of organizations, means that organizations no longer need to staff the resources to support the ongoing maintenance and security updates to Drupal. Organizations are now comfortable hosting websites, intranets and even portals on the cloud and Acquia is providing an enterprise cloud platform and support to meet their needs. Gone are the days of security professionals expressing concerns about open source, now that Acquia has provided HIPAA-compliant hosting and full support that addresses the needs of healthcare, financial services, and even the federal government.

About the Journey

While the web remains a consistent place for consumers to interact with their healthcare provider, the reality is that consumers are engaging across multiple channels – mobile, email, text and others. With pressure from new commercial entrants into healthcare like Amazon, CVS, and Walmart, healthcare organizations need to deliver an experience. Healthcare isn’t an experience most go looking for deliberately, so delight in their experience is a tall order. However, the healthcare journey is both complex and confusing, so understanding a user across that journey, through multiple channels, can make a difference in that experience.  Through a full Acquia Marketing Cloud, Acquia has products that allow us to track consumers across their patient journey, regardless of channel and meet them with the right message at the right time.

Leveraging the Community

With the need for digital transformation so high and yet budgets not increasing to meet those demands, healthcare organizations need to leverage the work of the community in ways that allow them to leverage those budgets toward innovation and differentiation, not on building the basic integrations. Drupal’s community has thousands of modules that address the common needs of healthcare sites, freeing up healthcare teams to create meaningful experiences to engage their consumers.

Click here to learn more from Acquia about how Perficient has been supporting the needs of healthcare organizations to engage with consumers, patients, members and physicians with the Acquia platform.

Back in 2017 when Salesforce and Sitecore announced a partnership with a limited amount of detail and a lot of fanfare, we were left wondering what exactly this would look like. While Salesforce is known as a CRM company, they actually provide a broad suite of tools, including a powerful tool for Email and Social marketing – Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

For users who have worked with Marketing Cloud in the past, it is clear that Salesforce didn’t fully consider issues of content authorship and governance, especially undervaluing the importance of the website channel. Now it becomes clear why Sitecore is such a powerful addition to that ecosystem.

While an integration between Salesforce CRM and Sitecore has existed for years, Sitecore and Salesforce unveiled the initial release and roadmap for the connector for Marketing Cloud at the recent Salesforce Connections conference in Chicago.

This connector will provide customers of Sitecore and Salesforce the tools to:

• Leverage Sitecore Content in Emails
• Enroll Sitecore Visitors in Journeys
• Coordinate Interactions Across Channels

Let’s review each of these in detail.

Leverage Sitecore Content in Emails

Your Sitecore site contains a repository of vetted content that is made up of components that can be easily reused in other channels, including imagery. This content, since it has been through a review process, can be provided to your Email Studio team for reuse in emails without a need to copy and paste – Sitecore’s dynamic content library is already the “latest and greatest.” In the initial phase of this rollout, Sitecore is focused on image reuse from the Sitecore Media Library, but the plan is to expand access from Sitecore to Salesforce Marketing Cloud for all of your content.

Enroll Sitecore Visitors in Journeys

Sitecore excels at creating a personalized experience on the site or through mobile, but if that user has left the site, how do we as marketers continue to engage them and move them to the next stage in the journey?

Marketing Cloud Journey Builder provides a way to coordinate interactions on the email or social advertising channel, adapting to the behaviors of that user. In the subsequent phase of the Sitecore connector, you’ll be able to enroll users into these Journeys as a part of your overall Marketing Automation plan.

Coordinate Interactions Across Channels

You need a single view of the user and a solution that lets you impact the journey of that user, regardless of the channel they are on. Future phases of the connector will deliver the ability to impact your strategies with information from all channels.

The obvious opportunities here are complex use cases like: changing the call to action on a page because you know the visitor didn’t open the last email, switching from email to paid social advertising because you know the visitor returned to the site yesterday, etc.

Synchronizing the actionable data between Marketing Cloud and Sitecore will open up strategies that are not currently available in two siloed systems.

As Salesforce loves to say at the start of every talk at their conferences, you should make decisions based on what is released right now – roadmaps and priorities can change. That said, there are a couple key ways that you can begin to prepare to leverage these combined tools:

• Upgrade to Sitecore 9 today– The integration here is made possible by the addition of xConnect to Sitecore. xConnect simplifies the integration of xDB data with other tools, such as CRMs and allows for more scalability in Sitecore.
• Start using Email Journeys – Salesforce Marketing Cloud enhances your email marketing beyond newsletters into communication informed by unique data and adapting to how that user is interacting with you.

Interested in knowing more about the impact for healthcare? Drop us a line.

Healthcare organizations traditionally have turned up their collective noses at open source content management system (CMS) software, citing internal policies and concerns about security and support. Rather, they’ve long preferred CMS solutions that can be licensed for their own and that have been developed by a single company, even if that single company is quite small or inflexible.

But in other industries, CMS tools like Drupal (which is freely available) have been gaining steam with large enterprise organizations. Open source CMS tools offer ever-increasing benefits, such as new features, flexible and free-to-use templates, and more. And these sites are secure, with continual, evolving security enhancements provided regularly.

So how can healthcare organizations, which requires airtight security and immediate site support more than many other industries, reap the benefits of open source CMS? Enter Acquia, a platform that addresses these concerns and provides a Drupal CMS that maximizes the benefits of open source while providing a secure, enterprise-ready solution.

Let’s touch on a few commonly asked questions about open source CMS for healthcare, and how we leverage our healthcare expertise via the Acquia platform

Who provides technical support for open source CMS software?

Open source software like Drupal is developed by a community of developers who donate their work to be used by others. While this allows the software to be available free of charge, this community of developers can’t necessarily be counted on to answer the phone when there is an issue. Obviously, this is a concern for healthcare organizations – having your site go down can be mission critical for you and for patients.

Acquia, a company that was started by the founder of Drupal, provides support reliability to healthcare organizations. Their team hosts Drupal sites and directly works to resolve any issues that arise with the platform.

Is an open source CMS secure for healthcare?

Open source software products such as Drupal approach security differently than licensed software. Their source code (and therefore any vulnerabilities) are more visible to potential attackers and potential fixers. This creates a feedback loop where the product is evaluated and fixed quickly. And it means that organizations leveraging Drupal must keep up-to-date with the latest security patches to ensure their platform remains secure.

Acquia provides ongoing security patching and a HIPAA-compliant hosting infrastructure that protects sites from potential attack. The Acquia team is actively and continually working on new features and enhancements to keep Drupal sites secure. In addition, MedTouch develops solutions that take the needs of healthcare into account by encrypting web form submissions from users and enhancing the system’s password requirements, ensuring that user-submitted data users remains secure.

Does Drupal CMS have the features I need?

The newest version of Drupal has introduced sophisticated ways to create pages that are built from flexible layouts and components. We can build and easily edit any type of site design in Drupal and create complex features that integrate with third-party systems. The public repository of modules created by the Drupal community and free for use by anyone with Drupal helps to reduce initial development time and ongoing maintenance cost.

We further provide key functionality that healthcare organizations come to expect from their CMS, such as physician directory functionality, calendar of events, and integration with products such as appointment scheduling.

While healthcare organizations have been slow to adopt Drupal as a CMS, those who do are finding an enterprise-class system that can meet their needs and stand up to the IT scrutiny required to protect their patients and their health system.

Healthcare organizations serve a wide variety of people with an even wider array of needs. It’s impractical to think that one single website experience could match each visitor perfectly.

A personalization strategy gives website users a unique experience tailored to their past actions on your site or interaction with an ad or email campaign. When properly implemented, personalization guides visitors through to the appropriate next step or conversion. However, implementing personalization is not an end to itself — it’s a strategy to help achieve your overarching goals.

Personalization doesn’t have to be a complex, expensive project. You don’t have to revamp your entire website. You can start small and grow from there. There are tools that layer on top of your existing site and tools that are built into the platform on which your site is built.

But before you start any personalization project, you first need to understand your audience, the problem you want to solve, and goals in order to select an effective strategy.

How to start the personalization process

When we work with clients on personalization projects, we start with a discovery session. We’ll ask questions such as:

• What are your key business objectives?
• What digital interactions help achieve those business goals?
• What personalization strategies can be used to help users in those digital interactions?

Next, we’ll research audience behavior, identify trends, and map out user flow through digital channels. This way we can pinpoint potential problems or opportunities for improvement.

Once we fully understand these details, we can begin to discuss the different types of personalization strategies that may be most appropriate for your website.

4 common types of personalization

Thanks to advances in technology and big data, the possibilities of personalization seem limitless. Don’t let the choices overwhelm you, though. There are four effective personalization strategies, and each can be customized to fit your specific resources and needs.

One more note: personalization doesn’t have to be “creepy.” You can enhance the visitor’s experience in subtle, yet helpful ways. It could be in little things, such as a slightly more specific call-to-action or one image in a hero carousel.

1. Segmentation

This strategy allows users to self-identify upfront to personalize their website experience (active selection) or sorts visitors into groups based on a simple categorizations (whether they’ve signed up for your e-newsletter, for example). This can be useful if someone comes to your site one day as a patient and the next as a caregiver for a loved one or as a job seeker.

By changing their preferences, they get an experience tailored to what they need at that specific point. For example, you could offer a drop-down category selection for a specific audience. You could let users select patient or family, career seeker, medical professional, or referring physician and show different quick tasks or features based on their selection.

2. Persona-based

This personalization strategy looks at the user as more complex and maps to your view of the patient journey. Persona-based personalization adjusts site information based on a user’s behavior.

To start, you’ll identify target audiences, which we call personas, and pinpoint which actions these personas will want to accomplish. Examples of personas may include “Katie: Ready to Start a Family,” “Yasmine: Busy Mom,” “John: Weekend Warrior,” or “Thomas: Newly Diagnosed with Cancer.” Then, you map content on your site to your personas and change the experience in key areas of your site to match their needs and goals.

Here’s how it works: “Katie: Ready to Start a Family” comes to your site for the first time and sees your general homepage. She looks at some pregnancy content and leaves. When she returns to your site, the homepage, messaging, imagery, and calls to action will be tailored to her. For example, the hero image may show a mom and baby, and the “Additional Links” may include “Prenatal Classes” and an “Ob/Gyn Provider Search” along with more general links for things such as “Pay My Bill” and “About Us.”

Everyone’s life and needs change over time. “Katie” may become “Yasmine: Busy Mom.” As she starts searching for pediatricians on your site, her website experience will change as well, giving her specific content as she needs it.

Keep in mind that not every visitor follows this sort of progression. Sometimes they return to your site looking for something entirely different, such as care for an aging parent or rehabilitation after an accident, as mentioned in the segmentation section.

3. Engagement plans

This campaign-based personalization strategy escorts users through a marketing funnel. It provides concise messaging to encourage conversion and is usually tied to a specific service line or a key objective. Engagement plans can be scaled up or down to fit a project’s scope, configured to be unique to a project, or duplicated to work for a different service line.

We know most people who come to a site though a paid search campaign won’t convert immediately. They may come back multiple times, depending on the service they’re interested in, before they take a next step, such as making an appointment or signing up for a class. Engagement plans allow you to be an active player in the decision journey.

Let’s say you run a campaign tied to your bariatrics program. If someone enters your site through an ad tied to weight loss surgery, their experience on the site will be tailored to that. To help ease them toward a conversion, such as signing up for a weight loss surgery seminar, you could give them a soft sell on the first visit, push the date a little harder on the second visit, and serve a pop-up “Reserve my spot” ad on the third.

For people who leave the site without taking an action, retargeting ads can keep you top of mind, with the adapted messaging based on their browsing history – within privacy constraints, of course.

4. Location-based

This personalization approach customizes content based on a user’s location, often using geolocation technology, to help the user find your organization’s nearest location.

For example, when a user comes to your site, the site can determine the user’s physical location and tailor the content based on the doctors, locations, and services near them. This means the user doesn’t have to wade through a long list of doctors or facilities to find one nearby. We always recommend allowing the user to override geolocation by entering a specific zip code. And for healthcare systems with multiple locations, location-based personalization can help a user determine when to go to a local hospital and when they might want to travel to see a specialist.

Measure engagement and adjust or expand as necessary

Once you’ve implemented a personalization strategy, there are multiple opportunities to tweak or expand your strategy.

• Monitor success: You can immediately begin tracking how people move through your website, but it may take two to three months to clearly see progress toward your KPIs.
• Adjust where needed: If the results aren’t what you expected, analyze what’s working and what’s not. Take that information and realign your strategy to reach your goals.
• Report on conversions: Key stakeholders will want to know how the project is performing. This can help if you request additional resources to expand the personalization strategy.

Your website should be a real-time marketing tool. Incrementally-implemented personalization strategies can help you provide the information your audience needs and increase conversions without necessarily completely revamping your website.