Symantec Connect
Symantec, founded in 1982, is one of the world's largest software companies with more than 17,500 employees in more than 40 countries. The company provides both security and storage and systems management solutions. Their customer base includes consumers, small businesses, and some of the world's largest global organizations. The company's phenomenal growth can be attributed to a combination of market acceptance and strategic acquisitions.
In early 2008, the company's Customer Experience (CX) team started crafting a roadmap designed to consolidate several of the support and pseudo-community offerings into a single, consistent, and best-of-breed community offering. The goal of this consolidation was to give Symantec customers a single point of contact where they could engage with the company's support, marketing, and product management teams. A secondary goal was to reduce the support costs associated with maintaining a collection of disparate community offerings.
In September of that year, Symantec decided to use the Drupal content management system as a foundation for their community initiative. Phase 1 of the effort (which took place over the next 6 months) involved merging the content and members from three disparate Symantec communities: 110,000 members from the "Symantec Technical Network" (STN) -- running on the Lithium platform; 10,000 members from the "Altiris Support Forums" -- running on FuseTalk; And 20,000 members of the Altiris "Juice" community -- already running on Drupal.
The name of this new online communication tool is "Symantec Connect" and -- as of this writing -- is serving up 250,000 page views each month to more than 150,000 registered users (and countless anonymous users). Connect is currently made up of more than 100,000 nodes and 250,000 comments.
Kudos
The Connect vision was made possible by a handful of contracting specialists and several hundred Symantec employees. Here's the short list:
Information Architecture, Visual Design
Symantec's Information Archicture (IA), User Experience (UX) teams worked together to create a look-and-feel that leverages the Symantec brand while keeping the user experience intuitive and user-friendly.
Infrastructure Lead
Jeremy Andrews from Tag1 Consulting helped us create a robust and scalable architecture that was optimized for Drupal.
Programming Lead
Ben Durbin from bendurbin.com is the brilliant brain who directed the addition of some amazing functionality to the Drupal framework.
Theming Lead
Jeffrey Dalton served as theming lead on the project which involved all cross browser theme coding and staff training. All theme work was created based on Symnatec's designs and wireframes.
Project Coordination and Facilitation
The team at WebWise Solutions, helped in the way a great project facilitation team can: help where you can, get out of the way when you need to.
We continue to work with the Symantec team (and our team of Drupal experts) to grow and improve the Connect experience for the millions of users who've come to rely on it.
