Onboarding overview
The Site Factory onboarding is delivered through Acquia Academy, which is Acquia’s learning management platform.
With Acquia’s self-paced electronic learning program, you can:
Gain familiarity with this product on your own schedule.
Implement Site Factory successfully.
Onboarding resources
The following resources are available to support you during your onboarding:
Acquia Support for product-related assistance
Planning for success
Acquia has identified that successful Site Factory implementations have alignment across the project team and organization. Acquia suggests that you identify personnel for the following roles:
Executive Sponsor: Acts as the primary stakeholder for the success of the Site Factory implementation.
Project Manager: Facilitates and tracks the progress of the implementation, and acts as the primary point of contact.
Platform Owner: Acts as a technical leader who takes ownership of the platform across departments.
Enterprise Architect: Defines and implement a configuration management strategy that works across all of your site types. This strategy remains compatible with Acquia’s delivery platform.
Site Factory Administrator: Responsible for all Site Factory administrative duties including defining permissions, system preference, and data structure.
Technical Subject Matter Expert: Assists with authentication, setup, or other technical implementation details.
Development Partner Lead: Takes ownership of the platform across departments. This is an optional role.
Customer preparation
The Site Factory onboarding is effective if you:
Have leadership alignment: Senior level leaders and enterprise architects must align with the fact that Site Factory is integral to the successful implementation of digital strategy and make it a priority for their team. If you can articulate why you are implementing Site Factory and what business challenges you want to solve, you can develop and implement the Site Factory platform.
Have defined success metrics: Having clear, measurable, and universally understood criteria helps all parties to measure and articulate the success of the platform.
Have an implementation team: You must have the right team to develop applications in Drupal and/or Site Studio on Site Factory. You can do it internally, or through a development partner or Acquia Professional Services.
Get trained and certified: You can identify project participants, developers, site builders, and account administrators who need access to the Site Factory onboarding resources. The onboarding provides several hours of specific training that requires you to become familiar and comfortable with navigating the user interface, as well as the development workflow on the Site Factory platform.
Have a distribution strategy: You must understand the distribution strategy for Site Factory and overall architecture, including Acquia Search, Site Studio, Pipelines, etc.
Establish governance and release management processes: You must identify the project participants, developers, site builders, and account administrators who can discuss and plan the proper governance strategy required for a successful Site Factory implementation. Having a strategy enables your organization to assign ownership, set priorities, and define shared guidelines, standards, and processes for all platform users.
Have Drupal skills: Site Factory merges enterprise Drupal hosting with Acquia’s software orchestration layer for delivering Drupal multisites. Drupal development skills helps you to maintain and enhance your platform. Such skills include content editing, site building, layout and theming, and custom module development.
Onboarding checklist
Site Factory onboarding consists of multiple tasks in your initial sprint, Sprint 0, planning. Complete the checklist in Checklist for migrating your sites to Site Factory as you navigate your onboarding. Although the topics described in this checklist are not complete, you can identify the work that is necessary for a successful launch, and also understand the tools that can assist you.
Additional support
Acquia offers enhanced support and guidance through additional paid services for those who seek additional individual instruction and guidance with Site Factory development, including:
To use Site Studio with your Site Factory development, see the e-learning material in Acquia Academy to understand how to use Site Studio as part of your implementation. For more information about onboarding enablement, see: Site Studio.
Acquia Technical Account Managers(TAM) provide you with guidance, best practices, training, and recommendations. Optionally, they can offer consultation about the general creation, deployment, and operation of websites on Site Factory Platform. This is in addition to Drupal expertise. For more information, see Technical Account Managers.
Acquia Professional Services engagements provide you additional support if you need further assistance when starting with Site Factory and Site Studio. For more information, see: Professional Services Product Guide.
If you need additional onboarding assistance, contact your Acquia account manager for additional information about the services available to you.