Our Client

Barnard College is one of the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges, dedicated to helping educate young women whose curiosity, drive, and exuberance set them apart. For over a century, Barnard alumnae like Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead, and Martha Stewart have helped change the world and the way we think about it.

Located in the cosmopolitan environment of New York City, Barnard offers the best in liberal arts education while simultaneously drawing upon the resources of one of the country’s leading research institutions, Columbia University.

This unique partnership enables Barnard to prepare its graduates to flourish in an increasingly interconnected world.

What They Needed

With dozens of subsites supported by hundreds of content contributors, Barnard needed an elegant, agile solution for maintaining and updating their Web presence. Palantir worked closely with Barnard to develop a solution that not only enabled site administrators to oversee the school’s entire site, but also empowered non-technical contributors to easily update content within their own individual sections.

Each one of Barnard’s nearly 50 departments and programs has its own subsite, maintained by its own set of content contributors and editors. Each one of these sites needed to have its own unique visual identity, while still fitting into the overall Barnard branding.

Many of Barnard’s content contributors and editors are responsible for multiple “sections” of the site that don’t necessarily correspond to the site’s menu system or information hierarchy. Some content contributors have their copy reviewed by one or more editors before it it is published live on the site. Barnard needed a way to assign rights to various types of users so that content could be created, reviewed, revised, and published across sections of the site and outside of the traditional information hierarchy.

Furthermore, the new site needed to integrate with Barnard’s existing LDAP authentication system to prevent users from having to create (and remember) new user accounts and passwords. Columbia’s course catalog system, which is used by Barnard, also needed to be seamlessly integrated with the new site in order to ensure that students, faculty and staff were always seeing the most up-to-date course information.

Although it was not yet released when the project began, Barnard chose to build their new site using Drupal 7, the latest version of the industry-leading open source content management platform. Palantir worked to port a number of essential Drupal 6 modules, including Domain Access, Menu Block, and Nodequeue, to Drupal 7 so that the Barnard site would have a full range of functionality at launch.

This decision enabled Barnard to benefit from the latest and greatest that Drupal has to offer and ensured that their investment would have the longest possible lifespan.

To create a single platform to maintain dozens of departmental and program subsites, Palantir leveraged Drupal’s Domain Access module. This enabled each department and program to have its own unique, standalone subsite under the barnard.edu domain, while still giving Barnard administrators the ability to oversee all of them within a unified interface and a common codebase. Future system-wide updates and changes will also be much easier to deploy in such a unified system.

How We Are Helping

Providing Barnard with tools that enabled content contributors and editors to update content within their specific “sections” of the site required a fundamental rethinking of Drupal’s approach to content management. The result was Workbench, an integrated suite of modules built exclusively for Drupal 7 that not only simplifies and streamlines the process of managing content, but also provides new ways to configure editorial access and workflow.

For content contributors and editors, Workbench bypasses the bulk of Drupal’s administrative menus and options, enabling those users to focus only on the content in their sections of the site. This gives those creating content on the Barnard site the tools that they need, unfettered by high- level administrative tasks that can confuse or complicate the process.

Workbench also provides configurable workflow states for content that needs to go through an editorial review process before publication. Administrators can easily configure the system to provide either default workflow states (like Draft, Needs Review, and Published), or custom states as needed. Plus, Workbench integrates with Drupal’s Media module, meaning that workflow states can be applied to media files as well as regular content.

Workbench’s intuitive interface allows users and administrators to ‘toggle’ between tabs for content moderation/creation, granular content management assignments, and reusable files, enabling those maintaining the site to quickly find the functionality they need to keep everything up-to-date.

Workbench provides authors, editors, and publishers with a unified interface for managing content relevant to them. It allows people to focus on content rather than on learning Drupal. Best of all, in accordance with the principles of open source, Workbench is available as a free download from drupal.org for anyone to use and share.

To ensure that faculty, staff, and students were able to use the site without a separate login and password or an administrator-created user account, Palantir integrated Barnard‘s existing LDAP- based authentication system with Drupal, giving anyone with a Barnard e-mail address the ability to log into the site.

Each departmental site features faculty profiles with biographical information, curriculum vitae, publications, contact information, and even office hours; all displayed in a clean and consistent manner. Faculty profiles are not only displayed on the main Barnard site, but they also appear on every departmental subsite associated with that aculty member. Administrators can easily keep faculty profile information up-to-date, and changes made in one place are automatically reflected throughout the entire site.

Finally, the site seamlessly integrates with Barnard and Columbia’s shared course catalog system so that course information is always up-to-date and easily available, either from individual department and program pages or from the site’s master course catalogue.

The Upshot

Since its launch in January 2011, Barnard’s new site has helped change the way that both internal and external audiences look at the institution. As Barnard’s Director of Electronic Communications, Scott DiPerna, puts it, “Our new website is going to reshape Barnard’s image. When visitors experience Barnard on the Web, that experience will now feel modern, functional, and sophisticated — exactly the kinds of associations we want people to make when thinking of Barnard.”

Palantir worked closely with Barnard’s students, faculty, and staff to build a site befitting one of the nation’s leading institutions of higher education. By using the most up-to-date Web technologies and developing flexible tools for updating, maintaining, and extending their site, Palantir helped ensure that Barnard’s new site would meet the institution’s needs for years to come.