Idéative is a Swiss web agency specialising in tailor-made digital solutions. The CHUV (Vaud teaching hospital centre) called on its expertise to create a complex digital ecosystem. For its customer, the team at Idéative designed a very high availability multi-site platform, an audiovisual resources portal and a remote training platform. Its experience in digital strategy, UX/UI design and development and the Infomaniak infrastructure made it possible to respect the hospital’s specifications for its different target audiences and users.

Idéative and Infomaniak worked hand in hand to design tailor-made solutions incorporating robust and durable technologies offering very high availability. Christophe Miville, CEO of Idéative

Idéative, cross-cutting expertise to optimise complex projects

An Infomaniak partner, Idéative accompanies flagships of the Swiss economy to develop demanding digital solutions. In particular, the agency creates “augmented” digital events by means of audiovisual productions and interactions using different channels and media. Its creations incorporate web and application development, business analysis, audiovisual, storytelling and digital marketing. The team looks to the long term in order to ensure the right technological balance of innovation/durability. Its specialists provide technical expertise on Drupal and TYPO3 (CMS), Laravel (tailor-made applications), React (front end) and React Native (mobile). By asserting its technological choices, Idéative ensures that its customers can always react to trends and adapt to the changes imposed by the web giants.

The mission: to design the digital ecosystem of the CHUV and ensure it is always available

We needed a tool that would enable us to provide and develop a platform focussing on the needs of the patient, their loved ones and professionals.  Paule Goumaz, Head of Internet at the CHUV

The CHUV is ranked among the best hospitals in the world. The media coverage it enjoys generates major peaks in the traffic on its website.

To meet the users’ needs at all times, the CHUV issued a call for tender for its new website in 2017. It needed to be able to rely on an external hosting infrastructure located in Switzerland and ensure the high availability of its sites.

The CHUV’s specifications also required the development of a platform for transferring knowledge and a multimedia content storage and sharing portal.

The challenges

  • To guarantee constant availability of the more than 80 websites of the CHUV thanks to a high availability cloud infrastructure based in Switzerland.
  • To develop a DAM solution (digital asset management) with:
    • a very high multimedia storage volume
    • an advanced research capacity and access rights management
  • To develop an interactive knowledge transmission platform for healthcare professionals

The solution: a range of reliable services with powerful synergies

Guaranteeing the very high level of availability of the CHUV’s 80 websites

Idéative had to find an infrastructure solution capable of powering more than 80 websites while meeting the needs of the CHUV and satisfying the technical constraints of the specifications. Roberto Presedo, CTO of Idéative

Our imperative was the redundancy of equipment so as not to store data in a single place and to enable the traffic to be distributed across several instances. By making it possible to absorb the peak loads for the CHUV’s websites, Infomaniak’s very high availability hosting solution met the needs of the project.

In total, 9 different machines comprise the high availability ecosystem implemented by Infomaniak. Jonathan Maire, sysAdmin and TYPO3 developer at Idéative

In tangible terms, the infrastructure implemented on behalf of the CHUV consists of:

  • 5 separate machines, used for classic Galera cluster and MariaDB.
  • 2 servers dedicated to the web files, replicating the TYPO3 application layer.
  • 2 upstream LoadBalancers, distributing the traffic in order to absorb peak loads.

An additional complexity linked to the web element of the CHUV was to implement a website generator. The centre is regularly required to create new websites (for its departments, for example). To provide almost total autonomy, the website generator is based on a standardised model and a tailor-made back-office module requiring no technical knowledge. A new website satisfying the CHUV’s criteria can be launched by completing a number of fields beforehand.

One of the most complex challenges to be addressed was to implement management of the temporary file locking policy to avoid simultaneous access to the same resource. As visitors are distributed across several TYPO3 instances, the resource locking information had to be shared quickly across these instances.

Storing, securing and broadcasting audiovisual content

Idéative uses Infomaniak’s services ecosystem to facilitate the transmission of knowledge and to store the CHUV’s multimedia content. Cédric Léger, Project Manager at Idéative

Infomaniak’s multimedia solutions are used together to store, secure and broadcast content (live and on demand) with the appropriate access rights. The multimedia files are deposited by the CHUV team in advance on a RAID 10 NAS replicated at Infomaniak. Advanced metadata are extracted automatically using Apache Tika and Exiftool, then enriched manually in TYPO3. This central point of the project is developed to make it easy to find content (tags, filters, etc.).

The advanced search is based on Apache Solr. The files are then automatically sent to the Infomaniak VOD/AOD platform. Idéative recovers the video streams to incorporate them into the user interface developed for the multimedia storage platform. At the same time, the Infomaniak API generates a token for a given user. Even if a link is shared, the content can only be consulted by this user.

Developing a platform to transmit LIVE events and knowledge interactively

The knowledge transmission platform benefits from the same technological base, with the addition of extra functions and services. The Infomaniak video streaming service extends the platform’s capacities with LIVE streaming and a user interface with live quizzes to obtain certificates. The interface is designed for training and regular consultation of content. The users can subscribe, read themed playlists and consult their reader history.

Working with Infomaniak has helped accelerate the implementation of projects

For the Idéative team and for Infomaniak, accompaniment is just as important as access to technology.

As partners, we maintain a regular link with the Infomaniak development team and our requests are all addressed efficiently. We have also benefited from the availability of the Infomaniak teams (assistance, support, advice in implementing the project).

The Infomaniak administration console is clear and efficient. It provides a global vision and ensures simplified management of the products. In practice, SSH access to hosting solutions and taking ownership of the VOD service and its API are made easy thanks to a streamlined interface. Roberto Presedo, CTO of Idéative

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