Fully automated Sitecore on Microsoft Azure PaaS for UnitingCare

UnitingCare Queensland is a courageous and creative health and community services provider and one of the largest charities in Australia. Built on compassion, it employs 17,400 staff and 9,200 volunteers, working with more than 430,000 individuals, families and communities in more than 460 locations across Queensland and the Northern Territory.

Through its brands, UnitingCare, Lifeline, Blue Care, The Wesley Hospital, St Andrew’s War Memorial Hospital, Buderim Private Hospital, St Stephen’s Hospital, and Australian Regional and Remote Community Services, it works to empower older people, those living with a disability, people requiring health care in hospital or at home, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, children and families.

It has the potential to connect with people at every life stage, but the merger of separate service brands in 2016 meant that UnitingCare was managing several websites and content management systems. They were looking for a way to consolidate the sites and chose Sitecore as their new website and CMS platform. After conducting extensive research across all service touchpoints both online and offline, UnitingCare also determined the need to better educate and empower the community to make the right healthcare choices based on their circumstances, supported through a more interactive online experience. To help with this, UnitingCare needed a customer-focused marketing platform that would help service their communities through all life stages.

It was one of the most fantastic examples of collaboration I’ve ever seen. A small, tight team delivered a large, complex site that talks to every single person in Queensland. That’s easy to say but incredibly hard to do. Dataweavers brought the IT maturity to use a DevOps approach of teams working simultaneously, while Azure gave us the speed to release quickly.

Dan Shaw
Group Digital Marketing Manager at UnitingCare Queensland

Partnering for success

With a drive to manage marketing technology platforms in a SaaS manner, UnitingCare’s Digital and Technology (D&T) team were looking for a Sitecore infrastructure partner to help with their current deployment and engaged Dataweavers to help.

Completed in around 60 days, working alongside Digital Creative Brand Agency and Sitecore Implementation Partner, Guerilla, Dataweavers created a fully automated Sitecore solution on Sitecore Managed Cloud. The Dataweavers team focused on building the DevOps platform, delivering secure, audited, maintainable and compliant infrastructure as code, provisioned and monitored on Microsoft Azure PaaS. Simultaneously working with the UnitingCare D&T team to complete load, penetration and security testing in preparation for launch day. The Dataweavers team also provided onsite go-live support to ensure the smooth and secure transition of the DNS and other third-party services.

UnitingCare and their agency teams are now able to bring new Sitecore features and functionality to market faster by deploying new code through automated, one-click deployments, including zero downtime, in just 25 minutes. Fast deployments mean website updates from the marketing team aren’t getting caught in the backlog, and UnitingCare’s customers are getting the information they need, when they need it.

The platform is proudly 100% aligned with Sitecore best practices and supports the Sitecore Experience Accelerator and Helix, resulting in an enjoyable developer experience and a happy marketing team that has access to all the features and benefits of Sitecore. Most importantly, the Queensland community now have a more user friendly, intuitive and valuable web experience that will continue to evolve with them into the future.

Get the Tech out the Way

Watch our recent interview with Dan Shaw from UnitingCare Queensland to learn how Dataweavers were able to deliver a scalable, predictable, fully automated & always up-to-date Sitecore solution for UnitingCare, backed by performance and security guarantee.