British Council

Ixis IT manage a range of Drupal sites for the British Council which generate over 25 million pageviews per month. We initially won the contract to develop and host the IATEFL conference site for 3 years and now also manage the conference community hub.

The IATEFL conference is a 5 day event with over 5000 attendees on site and thousands taking part on-line from across the globe 24 hours a day. IATEFL was a finalist in the e-Government national awards and due to the success Ixis successfully won the contract to implement the 2010, 2011 and 2012 sites.

Key achievements in the IATEFL project included:

• Features - The site was developed on the Drupal 6 platform with heavy emphasis on social features including a community forum, social media aggregation, and Twitter integration.
• Streaming video, audio podcasts and Flickr.com photographs were automatically brought in to the digital hub using RSS and tagging.
• Performance - Varnish caching was also implemented to increase performance and stability during the conference, which attracted over 750,000 unique visitors from 16 countries.
• Hosting - Ixis provided an enhanced SLA during the conference including 24/7 monitoring and alerting via SMS and proactive management of the site. We proudly provided 100% uptime during the conferences.

Ixis now also provide hosting and support for several other Drupal sites with the British Council.

"Ixis provide invaluable support to our suite of websites. They have proven to have the knowledge and skills to produce great looking and working websites no matter the size of the project. Their support is bar none one of the best I have encountered as they help us with our hosting solutions whilst finding better ways of delivering our content. Not only have ixis provide us with great hosting solutions but also help maintain and develop or websites to keep up in this competitive and ever changing market. I would gladly recommend ixis and their services to anyone looking for the professionalism Ixis have."

Martin Heineberg, Language and Media Coordinator Global English, British Council January 2012