Brand Orange: The repository that makes brand consistency easy

Project background 

Orange is a large French telecommunications company. It operates in 26 countries and has nearly 140,000 employees. Brand consistency is key to any business, but it may be challenging to maintain, especially for a large multinational company like Orange. 

This is where brand.orange.com comes in. The Orange Brand site aims to give a broad set of users the tools they need to tell the Orange story in a coherent and consistent manner. 

The Orange Brand site is used to showcase the brand to a wider (non-brand) audience in terms of essential elements comprising the brand (history, logos, and guidelines) and achievements (such as brand news, iconic milestones, and ad campaigns).

Meanwhile it also has to serve the needs of internal users for whom it acts as a central repository where all Orange employees and external partners can access all types of content (editorial) and assets (files such as photos, videos, guidelines). These assets and content are shared by internal brand management experts in the Orange Group from across the globe.

The site faced a number of technical challenges, including performance and scalability, and a CMS that was quickly becoming obsolete. As a result, a decision was taken to redevelop it in Drupal, and with the aim of ensuring it was a more collaborative, decentralised, fast, and flexible business tool. 

The new Brand Orange website serves as a library for thousands of users to access branding items.

Challenges 

Behind the Orange Brand site is an intricate web of digital assets and their external management system, as well as numerous application programming interfaces, that need to work with the Drupal CMS to ensure a smooth user experience for a large number of different users. 

This presented a few challenges: 

• All of Orange’s digital assets are stored and maintained in a third-party Digital Asset Management system, MasterMedia. One of the major challenges of the project was integrating with this tool where the client’s requirements pushed the API to the limit. 
• Harnessing the power of Drupal’s Layout Builder and how it can be extended to facilitate fine-grained access control, but at the same time facilitating that within the Orange Design system which drives the brand. 
• Dealing with multiple third-party APIs and getting them to work together using Drupal as the orchestrating layer. 
• Handling multiple layers of access across the business, and making it effective and user friendly, not just across Drupal, but within the external asset management system.
• Improving the performance of the site, as the previous implementation of the search system against the DAM API was suffering from significant performance issues. 
• A method was required that would allow us to use a new advanced search API, bypassing the known performance bottlenecks and delivering a fast user experience. 

Our approach 

We built a custom React front-end for the DAM using the third-party API, while still using Drupal’s user management to maintain access control across the assets. 

This has some key advantages: 

• A single system is used to manage users’ access control levels and access across different business areas. 
• Users from outside the business can be facilitated, and given access not just to the Brand site, but also to the assets in the digital asset system using the website as the controlling intermediary. 
• Performance is optimised by facilitating direct user → DAM integration, reducing the server capacity required to deliver the assets.

For the editorial layer, we used Layout Builder to integrate with the existing design system. 

Careful consideration of component design allowed us to develop a user-friendly way of creating and editing content, facilitating faster dissemination of guidance and direction across the organisation. 

Layered on top of this, we used the Group module to facilitate communities within Orange. 

As well as facilitating access to a page level, the editorial team can facilitate access on a per-component basis so that individual users can have a unique view of content on an individual page. 

Furthermore, menu items within the site navigation are customised on a per-group basis to facilitate a nuanced user journey across the site. 

Alongside seamless single sign-on for internal Orange users, we also have a tight integration with their marketing platform to keep user details up to date on an ongoing basis. 

Results 

A full server layer required to serve assets from the DAM was removed.

Access allowing editorial control to be delegated within the organisation is now in place. 

Bespoke user management and approval in place, allowing any user within the Orange organisation to invite and manage external users into the system, while managing tight control of access to the assets.