University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine Builds and Maintains Portfolio of Sites with WebOps

Why Pantheon 

The first Faculty of Medicine sites were hosted on the school’s internal servers, which were restricted to the extent that Brown and the Office of Communication had little ability to update sites. After shifting to Pantheon, Brown could quickly launch new sites and manage support tickets. “With the move to Pantheon, I’m completely independent,” says Brown. “I don’t have to wait for anyone. I don’t have to be in the office or be on a VPN to get to the server. I go in, set up my site and I’m off to the races. I love that we can set up a site and people can work on it before we start paying for the hosting,” Brown adds. “That, for me, is a really great thing.” 

Foster Interactive also appreciates not having to spend time on DevOps configuration for each project. “I was wasting 10 hours per week at least on deployments,” says Aidan Foster, Principal at Foster Interactive. “We know that a project without Pantheon will need extra hours to set up workflows…that’s wasted time not spent on building new features.” 

For Foster Interactive, the combination of a Drupal distro, Pantheon's Custom Upstreams, and automated testing make it possible to centralize and simplify site maintenance, which reduces the cost across all the sites. “We have extensive quality testing and deployment automation to allow us to minimize effort. We’ve scripted tools with complicated workflows,” says Foster. “We don’t want someone to push deploy 35 times because the odds of human error increase. We’re a small shop, but we punch above our weight—we do that with automation.”

We know that a project without Pantheon will need extra hours to set up workflows…that’s time that isn’t spent working on features.

— Aidan Foster, Principal at Foster Interactive

Results

The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto, together with Foster Interactive, were successful in orchestrating the rollout and subsequent management of over 35 distinct sites, and in reducing maintenance costs by a whopping 60 percent. Today, the Office of Communication single-handedly launches new sites for the Faculty of Medicine, manages and supports dozens of unique and complex websites, while maintaining consistent brand standards. Using Pantheon WebOps tools, Foster Interactive has been able to develop new site features, as needed, and maintains all of those sites by leveraging Upstreams and harnessing the power of automation. 

With the move to Pantheon, I’m completely independent,” says Brown. “I don’t have to wait for anyone. I don’t have to be in the office or be on a VPN to get to the server. I go in, set up my site and I’m off to the races.

— Roberta Brown, Digital Communications Specialist University of Toronto