Summary
Mediacurrent collaborated with Turner Studios and Shaw Science Partners on an engagement to create a cutting-edge, Drupal v6 based microsite. This project needed to facilitate real-time information and interaction between a host doctor and invited medical industry personnel.  The result was a highly successful, ongoing webcast series that is helping a pharmaceutical company launch a new product.

Company Profile
Our customer, Shaw Science Partners is one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical-marketing agencies. The physicians, scientists, educators, and writers on their staff work closely with prominent scientists and thought leaders in the medical community.   Shaw Science Partners has produced landmark educational programming and set innovative standards of pharmaceutical communications.In addition, we teamed up with Turner Studios, a division of Atlanta based kingpin Turner Entertainment Group (TEG).  Turner Studios provides resources and turnkey services for film, video, and audio production.  They were the ideal partner and are well-known for their high quality of work in the media industry.

Why Drupal
The decision to use Drupal came after several other external options were discussed.  However, for a microsite like this, open-source, and more specifically Drupal, was an easy choice.  The cost of ownership was significantly lower than any other solutions being offered.  In addition, Drupal’s ease of deployment time enabled us to meet a sensitive deadline, required no licensing fees, and modules that were ready to go or could be extended to meet any custom functionality that was required. Plus, Drupal’s highly customizable administration would allow webcast producers and directors to publish and administer site content during a webcast in real-time.

Significant Challenges & Solutions
The primarily obstacle was thinking with simplicity and usability in mind – our administrators (and users) in this case were almost exclusively doctors, who needed easily navigable commands.  To overcome this, we designed an attractive, but user-friendly interface with limited options.The user interface had to be legible from a short distance as the host of the webcast needed the ability to simultaneously monitor activity and read questions from a computer screen that had been submitted by viewers and vetted by the webcast producer.
In addition, all of the webcasts were done live and offered no margin for error (nothing quite like live video!).  With this in mind, we needed a reliable hosting architecture set-up.  The good folks at Turner utilized Akamai for their video feeds and we set up the site’s hosting account on a virtual private server (VPS).   We did a few dry runs and training tutorials before the first live webcast.  Mediacurrent is also available to provide technical support via a 1-800 number or instant messaging during the live webcasts.

Modules List
Mediacurrent researched a variety of module options before deciding on what we felt was the most viable approach.  Here is a cross-section of the more noteworthy modules:

• Poll, Comment and Profile (core) were heavily themed to add site context and site specific usability features.Admin Theme Used in a creative way to allow a simplified theme to be used on certain administrative pages as well as some key content areas of the site which shaved time on both coding and theming tasks.
• Ajax Comments - comments needed to be submitted to the host without a page refresh so ajax comments was essential.
• Better Formats - needed to enhance the input formats for content.
• Secursite - allows the site to be secured against any anonymous access.
• Single Login - used to ensure two or more users can’t login to a site under the same account at the same time.
• User Import - users for each webcast session are imported into the site by an outside physician marketing agency using a standardized CSV file.
• Views Export - using the views_export module, from the Views Bonus module package, a view was created to export each webcast’s viewer set to a CSV file for use by the physician marketing agency.
• Views Bulk Operations - VBO was used to create a simple dashboard for admin tasks such as publishing polls and forwarding queued user submitted questions to the host.

We discovered numerous bugs and conflicts between modules, but fortunately there were several patches discovered in the issues queues and we contributed a few back ourselves along the way.

Final Thoughts
This project was neat because it really showcases the changing face of web based marketing and the role Drupal can play.  This use case exemplifies how Drupal can help organizations reach a targeted audience, and educate them on a major medical breakthrough like a new pharmaceutical product launch.  The time to deploy was fast and efficient. 
From a technology standpoint there was one takeaway that we would have done differently in hindsight – we would have liked to debug the poll feature, so that it better leverages the ajax refresh features.  This would have resulted in hogging less memory when refreshing a poll node page in an iframe.