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Welcome to Aha Consulting

Aha Consulting brings Drupal to the Enterprise. Our focus is helping private and public-sector organizations leverage the power of Drupal as their public facing web presence and internally as the framework for integrating information across departments, agencies and locations. Once viewed as just a content management system - Drupal has grown into an enterprise class solution for capturing, authoring, publishing, categorizing, indexing and displaying both structured and unstructured data.

Aha's expertise spans from conceptualization through analysis, design, development, testing, training, deployment and support for enterprise class Drupal implementations in both the private and public sectors. We understand how to effectively design solutions that will engage your users and lower your cost of delivering products, services and support to your customers, clients and constituents.

Aha's eGovernment Portal

Aha Consulting understands the unique needs of municipalities and the information architectures necessary to support them. Best in class eGovernment websites organize and present information in a way that caters to many different audiences, providing the site visitor a unique and tailored experience. Residents, visitors, business owners, and city employees typically represent the primary user profiles for a municipal site. Specialized content for seniors, children, home-based businesses, and commercial businesses are examples of how a municipality might further distinguish and set itself apart from the average website.

Aha's eGovernment Portal addresses these challenges by implementing an information architecture that accommodates for rich flexibility in the way content is stored and delivered to each unique website user. Specifically, we will enable role-based content authoring and approval based on department so an organization's staff can create and store web pages based on their logical departmental organizational structure; in parallel, we will expose and present content to end-users in a targeted way through the combination of intuitive, audience-specific navigational menus and dynamically-presented content that is driven by relevant content tags and taxonomies.

Aha Consulting Releases ePayments Module for eGovernment

Aha Consulting released a new ePayments extension to our Drupal based eGovernment solution. This payments module provides city, county and state agencies and departments with the capability to accept secure online credit and debit card payments from constituents, who use a simple to fill out form with billing and payment details.

Aha's ePayments framework also provides the capability to integrate with your existing billing systems (e.g., water, sewer, library, planning and permits) - providing a seamless online bill presentment and payment system - minimizing or eliminating the need to mail paper copies of bills to residents and businesses. The framework also provides the ability to aggregate bills across departments - providing the constituent with an integrated single bill for all city, county or state services.

For more information please click on the contact link in our main menu.

Aha Set To Launch Drupal Disaster Recovery and Offsite Backup Services

Aha Consulting is set to release a suite of new service offering aimed at organizations who rely on Drupal for mission critical web sites and web applications. Aha's service offerings will come in two variations:

Disaster Recovery with Hot Site capabilities
Off-site Backup and Restore

Both service offerings are individually tailored to each client's specific service level requirements.

Drupal Disaster Recovery with Hot Site Backup

Our Drupal disaster recovery with hot site backup offerings provides a level of assurance that in the case of a catastrophic failure of your web server or core infrastructure, your website will return quickly to service the needs of your visitors. Leveraging Aha Consulting's off-site backup tools, we will maintain an up-to-date version of your entire site, ready for production should the need arise. We will offer three basic Drupal disaster recovery packages - each aimed at varying levels of backups (e.g., hourly, daily, weekly) and availability (hot site, within 2, 4 or 8 hours).

Drupal Offsite Backup and Restore

Aha Releases Electronic Drupal Monitoring Service Beta

Aha Consulting has developed an electronic Drupal monitoring service (Drupal EDMS) that helps organizations monitor and manage their Drupal installations. EDMS monitors key attributes of your Drupal based website and generates electronic alerts (emails) that are sent to your site's administrator when a measurement exceeds a configurable threshold. Example areas that the EDMS will monitor include:

Disk space usage
MySQL Database issues

Connectivity
Crashes
Table space
Performance thresholds

Apache errors
General log file monitoring

The intent of this new toolkit is to help organizations proactively deal with Drupal infrastructure issues before those issues impact the users of the website. Additional features and functions will be added to our Drupal EDMS over the coming months. For more information on Aha's Drupal EDMS please contact us

Aha Consulting Releases Version 2.0 of Our Methodology for Leveraging Drupal in the Enterprise

Aha Consulting has released Version 2.0 of our project management and systems development methodology for projects focused on an enterprise-wide Drupal implementation. Our structured and thorough methodology leverages our team's decades of experience in designing and developing complex enterprise-class solutions for organizations such as Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, and Oracle. Aha Consulting has captured our Big-6 consulting expertise and applied that knowledge within our Drupal focused methodology. Our step-by-step methodology guides a project team through the phases of:

Discovery: identifying the scope and requirements for your Drupal focused project
Design: designing the information architecture, visual representation, navigational schema, taxonomy, and identifying Drupal modules required to support the requirements of your Drupal based site
Construction: architecture deployment, Drupal installation and configuration, module installation / configuration / customization, custom module development and content migration
Testing, Training and Deployment: testing your new Drupal solution, training your users and administrators, and deploying the system to production
Maintanence and support: maintaining and supporting an enterprise-class Drupal installation

Aha Set to Release eNotifications Drupal Module

Aha Consulting is preparing to launch a new eNotifications extension to our Drupal based eGovernment platform. The eNotifications extension provides the ability for site visitors to register for a daily or weekly email that presents a digest of new or updated content focused on their specific areas of interest. This simple to use extension presents a site visitor with a registration form where they select a list of taxonomy driven categories of content on the site (e.g., city council, planning, library, parks and rec, police and neighborhoods) from which they can select. Visitor registration only requires that they select at least one category and provide their email address. Emails are automatically generated and delivered based on the city, county or state defined intervals (daily, weekly, monthly).

Our eNotifications platform also provides the ability to broadcast emergency alerts to constituents who have registered to receive email digests. Emergency broadcasts are distributed on demand - with immediate delivery to those who have registered on the site. Our next release will include the ability for constituents to specify SMS alerts for emergency broadcasts - allowing emergency broadcasts to be delivered as text messages to their cell phone and PDAs.

For more information on our eNotifications platform please use the contact link on our main menu.

Aha Leverages Google Maps to Visualize Content

aHa Consulting is helping our clients change the way they present information to their users by integrating Google Maps with Drupal. There are several categories of content that lends itself well to visualization through maps rather than traditional text based content rendering techniques. Examples include:

Construction projects
Parks and recreation facilities
Land use cases
Schools
Libraries
Job Postings
City, Count, State services locations

In addition to the traditional representation of physical locations on a map, aHa's Drupal/Google Maps integration framework provides the ability to visually represent any site content on a map based on the geograhpic location of the content's topic by assigning a physical location to a content item (e.g., land use case, items on the Planning Commission's agenda, Police reports, business licenses). Through this capability users can search content based on geographic proximity. Examples of this capability include:

Show me all land use cases from the past year within 5 miles of my home address
Show me all City Council meeting minutes where topics included items that are within 2 miles of my home address
Show me all new business licenses granted over the past month within 2 miles of a specific address

Aha Announces Drupal Migration Services

Aha Consulting formally launched a new suite of services aimed at organizations wishing to move from other content management solutions (e.g., Joomla, Mambo, Typo3, Sharepoint,Vignette, Wordpress, Interwoven, an others) or from static HTML base websites to Drupal. Marketed as Drupal Jumpstart - our new service offerings are focused on helping organizations quickly and efficiently migrate from their existing environments to Drupal. The service offerings bundled into Drupal Jumpstart include:

Drupalizing your existing website theme/template
Deploying a base Drupal install with your new Drupalized template
Identifying Drupal contributed modules that provide the functionality required to support the use of your site
Migrating existing content and users to the new Drupalized site
Training your staff how to use the new Drupal based solution
Testing and Deployment to Production

Aha Consulting also offers a full suite of services aimed at organizations that wish to redesign their website on Drupal. Those services include the items listed above plus

Defining the information architecture required to support your organization's web initiatives an requirements
Developing your site's creative design and creating a Drupal theme from that design

Aha Consulting Selected as Author and Editor for ITToolBoxes "Drupal In The Enterprise" Column

Aha Consulting has been selected as the author and editor of ITToolbox's (it.toolbox.com) Drupal in the Enterprise column. IT Toolbox is a global online community of professionals who share practical information on IT topics. This community enables anyone to access the collective knowledge of a worldwide audience of experienced professionals. In doing so, ITtoolbox satisfies the need for practical and timely information for an infinite number of possible challenges in the complex and rapidly changing field of information technology.

The focus of the column will be how to effectively leverage Drupal across the enterprise, whether that be a public or private organization. Coverage will include:

Drupal best practices
Drupal design frameworks
Integrating Drupal with legacy data and applications
Leveraging Drupal as a web application platform
Using Drupal to manage and publish structured and unstructure data
Extending the reach of your organization to your constituents, clients, customers, suppliers and communities through Drupal
Scaling Drupal for the enterprise
Using Drupal to support user generated and managed content
Leveraging Drupal as your enterprise content and document management solution
Using Drupal as your intranet platform

Free Assessment

Considering a revision to your website? Contact us by clicking HERE and request a free website assessment. We'll provide a report showing you how your organization can benefit from our Drupal based web portal products.