Novartis Community - Together in Heart Failure

How I built social networks for Novartis brands.

About

Novartis wanted to create a support network for patients suffering from Heart Failure. They asked Beyond to create a platform that provides a powerful space for community, education, and growth, and because the product was built to scale, it could be easily applied to new brands.

Build

The backend was built with Python, Django, a custom Django admin interface, REST APIs using DRF, and Redis for caching. The Front uses a custom AngularJS/JSPM/Gulp Boilerplate, and the UI used SCSS and followed the BEM Methodology.

Role

• Backend lead/developer
• Provided estimates, scoping and technical oversight
• Mentored junior developers

Challenges

From the system architecture perspective, a big challenge was to define how we could support multiple social networks for different brands.

After reading more about multiple tenants, I have decided to follow the approach of using the same codebase and a shared database but with separate schemas (django-tenants was very useful).

Using a custom admin interface, allowed customizing all aspects of the social networks, such as copy, theming, logos, and images.

Learnings

This was a new challenge, however, I had built similar moderation tools for Novartis in the past, but at this time we could leverage the Cloud (AWS).

• Using django-tenants it made it easy to support multiple tenants, however, it made Django migrations more complex to create and run.
• Additional security changes had to be added since Django in combination with django-tenants generated the same password reset link secret across multiple tenants.
• Onboarding new developers was harder due to the added complexity of multiple tenants and migrations.
• Not everything was automated, some tasks required manual actions, such as buying domains, SSL certificates, and setting up the DNS routing.

Results

• 5+ minutes spent on the site by each user
• 2000+ posts from members upon launch
• 150+ new members each month
• 2 social networks deployed

Media