We're proud to provide Integration services.

Expand
Disrupting the storage industry.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht
  • Senior Architect
    Kelly Albrecht

All College Storage had an idea for a brand new online business. They wanted students from a university to be able to schedule the pickup, storage, and delivery of their dorm items over the summer. Items would be picked up at the students old dorm, then delivered to the new dorm at a requested date and time.

In addition to a full branding treatment, we developed a solution for students to reserve and configure when and where their items would be picked up and delivered.

An iPad point of sale interface was also developed for employees to process payment for each customer during pickup time as well as to manage all business workflow. All College Storage soon became the premier moving and storage solution for students in Western Mass.

The business was a success from day one, soon expanding from five colleges to eleven colleges and four prep schools, and it continues to succeed and expand.

Following this model, LCM assisted All College Inc. in replicating the successes with All College Storage to another startup for laundry service, called All College Laundry.

Expand
Catalog integration for Queens Library.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht
  • Senior Architect
    Kelly Albrecht
  • Senior Development
    Kelly Albrecht

Team augmentation for increased capabilities.

Queens Library needed to integrate its developing content management system into its Book and Media Catalog systems to display realtime information and allow interaction between site visitors and its collection.

We were approached for assistance in developing the custom module foundations for these integrations.

We joined the Queens Library IT team and provided coaching as well as custom code.

Our engagement included working with in-house developers and other development teams to build custom modules, displays, and workflows to complete the integrations. Handoff of our work included training and enablement of internal Queens Library developers.

Queens Library launched its new and fully integrated website on Drupal as an interface to display realtime catalog information and facilitate customer interaction.

Expand
The new Coupon Craze on Drupal.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht

CouponCraze.com’s website was outdated and falling behind when it came to SEO and rankings. In order to gain market share, the owner needed a way to automate the posting and filtering of certain coupons.

You did an amazing job on Coupon Craze.

Matthew Schwartz, Founder, Chief Creative Officer, MSDS

A new sitemap was devised, consisting of both categorization pages as well as merchant pages. Each page of the site has the ability to “feature” certain coupons, which are chosen automatically or overridden by an administrator. We leveraged Drupal to aggregate new coupons, categorizing and qualifying them automatically, as well as weeding out any duplicates as they come in. Due to the high volume of content on every page, we implemented a performance plan that met stringent testing requirements.

“There are always bumps along the way in a project this complex, but we took them in stride and did what we had to to get it done. You should all give yourselves a serious pat on the back. For a small team we kicked some serious ass on this. Thanks.”

Matthew Schwartz, Founder, Chief Creative Officer, MSDS

Coupon Craze is now positioned well for the future. SEO value, site speed, and depth of content have all improved. The automated workflows now allow the operators more time for social media ventures and blogging.

Expand
Continuous delivery to the council.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht

We’ve been proud of our long standing support to the CIO Executive Council, a subsidiary of the International Data Group (IDG).

Their flexibility has allowed me to interact with them as an ad-hoc branch of my own IT department, responding to projects and help-desk issues with equal competency.

Steve Wills, Sr. Manager, Applications Development at the CIO Executive Council at IDG

How we did it

We enjoy working as a team to deliver on our full service commitments.

We deliver a range of expertise to provide solutions for things like integrating with SalesForce to pull in membership data, integrating for set automated set up of group based content access on their subscriptions driven web service. Another example, moving them to a highly available, scalable cloud based infrastructure with Apache Solr and high performance caching technologies.

Expand
A national treasure migrated to AWS with no downtime.

Processes
  • Agile/Kanban
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership

StoryCorps is an independently funded organization that collects, shares, and preserves people’s stories to remind people of our shared humanity, to strengthen and build the connections between us, to teach the value of listening, and to weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that everyone’s story matters. All collected stories are stored in their online archive, accessible to the public upon submitting a request or listening to recordings at various public library listening rooms. StoryCorps reached out to LCM for ongoing support and assistance with migrating their site’s archive of roughly 27TB worth of interviews and information to a new AWS platform. 
 

The main StoryCorps Archive access point was built on a robust Drupal platform consisting of over 60,000 interview records and approximately 27TB of associated metadata, WAVs, MP3s, JPGs and PDFs. The StoryCorps Archive platform connected with several critical business systems and performed around-­the-­clock ingests from their on­site storage arrays to the Drupal system, via rsync. StoryCorps was looking for a trusted and capable firm to migrate their entire Archive— including the website, connected services, and media— from their single-­server host to a combination of Amazon Web Services (AWS), EC2, S3 and Glacier.

Last Call Media performed a thorough analysis and audit of all StoryCorps’ source data prior to and following the massive migration. We worked closely with StoryCorps’ internal Digital Team and engineering consultants to design, test, implement, and ultimately maintain the new AWS server infrastructure.

The archive is now running smoothly on a robust AWS setup, configured to allow the platform to efficiently scale and grow as the archive does; to the next 27TB and beyond. 
 

Expand
Best-in-class content delivery and caching.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership

As part of our ongoing engagement with the Commonwealth, we identified an opportunity to improve customer and constituent experience by leveraging the Cloudflare CDN (Content Delivery Network). Following the initial discovery phase, we architected, implemented, and deployed Cloudflare’s Global CDN product to give the site best-in-class content delivery and caching, while maintaining all the functionality of the previous CDN while improving development capabilities.

Creating Undetected Changes.

In the discovery phase, we reviewed the marketplace to find the most appropriate CDN for the State’s use case, balancing security, performance, and cost considerations. Ultimately, Cloudflare was selected as the best fit because of its extensive firewall and DDOS protections, and granular cache control using “Cache Tags,” which have the potential to boost performance for the constituents and reduce the risk of site instability.  

The first, and perhaps most critical concern we addressed in the course of this project was that the CDN needed to be resilient, serving pages even if the site itself was not functioning properly. For example, the development team does code releases periodically that take the backend of the site completely offline, but constituents still need to be able to access content during this time. To meet this requirement, we adjusted the site’s caching headers to include directives to serve cached responses in the event of an error response received from the origin.  As a result, constituents are able to access the majority of Mass.gov, even if a catastrophic event takes the web servers completely offline.

As a government website, Mass.gov is always at risk of attack from malicious actors. To mitigate this risk, Last Call Media undertook extensive configuration and testing of Cloudflare’s various security features, including the Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDOS protections, and custom firewall rules. We had a few hiccups along the way with configuring the security features (at one point, content authors were receiving CAPTCHA verifications when submitting their changes), but were ultimately able to work through these issues to dial in the right balance of security and ease-of-use.

Next, we implemented Cloudflare’s brand new “Workers” feature, which gives granular control over CDN functionality using a javascript “service worker.” The Worker we wrote for this project handles more than 6 million requests a day, and gives the Commonwealth the ability to test and deploy CDN level changes to development, staging, and production environments independently, making it much faster and safer to verify and release changes. The worker implementation benefits the Commonwealth giving them flexibility for the future, while also reducing cost over the previous CDN.

These workers were also integral to the success of this migration beyond what we had initially imagined. During the testing and release phases of the project, they gave us a mechanism for fixing changes that was reviewable and testable. Having a well-defined review and deployment process improved the team’s visibility into what changes were being made, and let us avoid silly mistakes. Overall, we felt the development team’s velocity was greatly improved by using this workflow.

The migration went as smoothly as possible, there were no negative results.

Mass.gov raved:

I hope you are puffed up with pride. We simply couldn’t have done any — much less ALL — of this mountain of work without you. You’ve been a rock. Well, a very hard-working and creative rock. We are so lucky to have your help.

Lisa Mirabile, Project Manager

For the future we envision phase 2 to be granular cache invalidation. This would mean when a piece of content changes, the CDN would only invalidate only that piece of content so it’s fresh in the cache. What that allows us to do is set really long cache lifetimes on the edge content. We would be able to cache pages for even a year and rely on the invalidation to make them fresh when we need to be, reducing the load on the backend servers significantly. In its current state, pages now only get cached for 30 minutes. With a longer available cache time, we’d see immediate results for less load time, it would be less costly for infrastructure, and lessen the chances for a backend disruption.

Expand
Bringing buyers and sellers closer together.

Processes
  • Agile/Kanban
Team Leadership

As the world’s largest independent marketplace for digital advertising, AppNexus delivers powerful enterprise technology for buyers and sellers of digital ads. The marketing team at AppNexus needed a robust digital platform to communicate their value, experience, and products to bring potential ad buyers and sellers together to support their goal of creating a better internet.

After the completion of a series of creative exercises, the LCM team delivered a modern, dynamic, global rebrand of AppNexus.com in fewer than 5 weeks. The platform tested well with key audiences and led to tangible positive business outcomes for AppNexus, including helping facilitate their multibillion-dollar acquisition by AT&T

Theming swiftly and efficiently with components 

One of the major outcomes of this project was a dynamic yet simple to use site building experience for content authors and theming experience for front-end developers. A component-based approach allows AppNexus to browse a library of reusable content patterns to build pages that are on-brand throughout the site while also making it easier for front-end developers to implement creative feedback. 

Using Mannequin, our component library tool, the front end team was able to focus on standard front end technology without worrying about CMS implementation details to quickly theme the front end using paragraphs. This was useful as many of the front end developers on the team were not familiar with Drupal but were able to theme parts of the site easily using Mannequin. 

The homepage animations, a critical piece to the visual experience, were delivered by the front end team who used particles.js. 


Managing first impressions and talent recruitment in one spot

To support their rapid growth strategy, AppNexus needed a robust careers section, “Life at AppNexus”. The careers section highlights the authentic employee experience at AppNexus, the various teams, the application process, and clear calls to action to their Applicant Tracking System (ATS), COMPAS, which is embedded in the Drupal CMS. Job applications are pulled in from COMPAS. With this new talent acquisition initiative in place, AppNexus is able to efficiently promote itself as a desirable place to work and creating a positive first impression for prospective candidates, leading to increased direct hires. 

Increasing analytical visibility using Marketo

By implementing a Marketo integration that sends form responses directly into predefined workflows in AppNexus’ CRM, we were able to give more visibility into valuable business analytics that were not previously captured. AppNexus was also able to utilize their content more effectively for lead generation, by introducing gated content such as whitepapers.

With multiple vendor involvement and a tight timeline, the AppNexus project had a lot of moving parts from the start. Even with frequent changes, LCM, the creative agency, and AppNexus benefited from a frictionless, highly collaborative, and efficient working relationship, which lead to a compelling and well built finished product. 

Expand
Helping patients learn more about their options for medical professionals.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership

Helping patients identify and connect with a medical professional best suited for their needs.

A key component of the web presence for Columbia Medical School is their faculty profiles. In keeping with their tripartite mission of teaching, research, and clinical work, the University displays two distinctly different types of profiles. Department web site profiles focus on the individual’s scholarly work and administrative positions. The ColumbiaDoctors website displays information about the physician’s clinical work including specialties, practice locations, and insurance. It is also just as important for new medical professionals to store and access their profile information in one place as it is for the departments and practices they are a part of. 

Maintaining a complex system with many data feeds and manual verification of information was becoming a burden for the University’s support staff, and the complexity of the process to create or update a profile was vexing to faculty and their support staff. Columbia University Medical Center looked to LCM to help them find a new solution. There was a preference for moving to an existing solution available in the marketplace rather than building a new custom solution. 

We embarked on an intensive information gathering phase, to better understand the existing technology, data inputs and outputs, and nature of the support queue. Through preparing user stories, we worked with the University to identify stakeholders groups, and we conducted detailed interviews with individuals in each group to understand their pain points within the existing system.

Finally, we conducted extensive research to identify potential solutions. We identified a number of peer institutions and investigated the faculty and physician profiles, and - to the extent possible - the technologies and workflows employed to create them. We contacted a number of vendors to gather more detailed information and winnowed the list of candidates to those that presented the best possible fit. We summarized our findings recommendations in our final meeting with the team.

By working closely with the team and developing a strong rapport with them, as well as the stakeholders, we were able to gain a clear understanding of their goals and deliver actionable recommendations 
 

By working closely with the team and developing a strong rapport with them, as well as the stakeholders, we were able to gain a clear understanding of their goals and deliver actionable recommendations to support CUMC’s business goals.