CiviCRM and CiviMail in a Large "Secure" Environment

[dmdude]

I am wondering if we can use CiviCRM and CiviMail in our environment.  We are a Drupal 7 shop, and we have "split" our Drupal installs into a "runtime-only" version that runs on one set of webservers, and the full "admin" version that people use to update their site on another set of servers.  The MySQL db and a portion of the filesystem for file/image uploads is shared between the runtime and admin websites.  The admin websites are internal only behind our firewalls, while we have ports 80 and 443 open to the Internet for our runtime servers.

We want to use CiviCRM for sending newsletters and surveys.  We want the newsletters and surveys archived on the Drupal Websites.  We want the people sending out newsletters and surveys to type in their data in templates that will then be sent looking like a page from their website.   Then we want the newsletter and survey authors to see bounce rates, click-through rates, and open rates.

Is this possible?  How would it be recommended to set up?  Should we install CiviCRM on our admin servers?  Perhaps use CiviCRM on new Webservers, and put them in a subdomain?  Would we want to split the Drupal and CiviCRM databases?

This system would generate a potentially large number of emails.  We're running Drupal on a LAMP stack.  Right now, there is no integration between our email system and websites.  We can fairly easily copy our site templates to different servers if that helps.

[Donald Lobo]

a few thoughts and comments:

1. Might want to chat with the folks at New York State Senate regarding their setup and how they manage their stuff. Might be useful to your set of organizations also. If you need contact info there, send me email: lobo at yahoo dot com and i can make the introductions

2. To some extent a lot depends on who/what is your contact DB? Is it primarily the users of the drupal website or is it from a voter DB. If the latter, are you planning to give them accounts in the front end website

3. I do think what you want is achievable. Might require a few tweaks and some creative ideas, but between drupal + civi + views + webform_civicrm i suspect we can meet your goals

4. If you are in the DC area, might want to attend this sprint:

http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=216

If there are other folks in your org who need to get upto speed on Civi, there is also a user training at the same time:

http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=212

lobo

[dmdude]

Thanks for the info.  Our contact DB comes from both people signing up through the websites, and purchased mail lists.  Our users like them to be as big as possible, but the CiviCRM software will be required to remove all contacts that result in NDR's.  Right now, there is no sign-in capability on the websites, although there is much discussion on how to change that.

[Donald Lobo]

I think the big decision will be if you want to tie civicrm to the drupal site and/or keep it as its own separate site and get the drupal site to interact with it via the API (primarily for folks signing up on the website)

lobo