Case Study: UNITE HERE
UNITE HERE is a labor union representing over 950,000 workers and retirees throughout the United States and Canada. Over the years, the Union's communications and information technology infrastruture had become very fragmented. Its family of roughly 50 websites was hosted on various platforms (ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, and various commercial and proprietary CMSs). In addition, the Strategic Affairs department had an urgent need for many database applications; critical decisions could not be made, because the necessary information couldn't be extracted from a collection of home-grown Access and FileMaker databases maintained by researchers across the continent.In 2005, UNITE HERE selected Clever Name Here Inc. to rationalize its operations, including all of the public- and private-facing web operations. A massive job, the project required that we choose a standard CMS platform and database architecture; port over 50 websites into the CMS; and migrate upwards of a dozen heavily used databases with, collectively, over 200,000 records created by the Strategic Affairs department.
For a CMS, the team selected the open-source SPS platform as a suite of tools which was flexible and open enough to support the Union's extremely wide range of functional requirements. The team chose to develop custom applications on the LAMP stack, using SPS both as an out-of-the-box CMS and as a toolkit of resources for creating custom applications.
The process took over a year, and required working closely with individuals and departments throughout the Union. On the Strategic Affairs side, we needed to work with six different teams: the Customer Team, the Boycott Team, and researchers for the Hotels, Airports, Laundry, and Food Service workers. Each team had their own set of requirements, their own legacy data to import, and their own set of permissioning and workflow. In the end, we created six separate-but-linked database applications, writing a total of 25,000 lines of custom code in the process.
On the public side, the Union has over 50 web sites, ranging from small campaign sites to major multilingual communications initiatives. Our team migrated the sites to a single dedicated server; converted them all to a single, unified CMS; and rewrote any legacy custom applications using LAMP and the standard tools that we'd developed. The process required porting over 10,000 individual templates, hundreds of which were dynamic database-driven pages.
When we finished, the Union had completely rationalized its online operations. Legacy sites and applications have been fully ported and integrated; new sites and applications can be easily slotted into the infrastructure; and we have made dramatically easier the jobs of the departments of Communications and Strategic Affairs.
