AG2R LA MONDIALE

Project Overview

The migration for AG2R LA MONDIALE was a high-stakes endeavor. Beyond the technical move from Jahia 7 to 8, Gladtek took a lead role in training and guiding the client’s internal development team, elevating their performance and technical standards. The mission was to ensure a seamless transition for both editors and end-users while building a future-ready internal technical unit.

The Challenge

AG2R LA MONDIALE’s existing infrastructure was heavily customized over several years, leading to “technical debt” in their custom modules. Key challenges included:

• OSGI Illiteracy: The internal development team lacked critical expertise in OSGI standards, resulting in slow development cycles and an inability to maintain modern Jahia 8 architectures.
• Zero-Downtime Migration: Maintaining portal availability across multiple environments during the cutover.
• Legacy Module Refactoring: Converting several Jahia 7 modules to the newer OSGI standards used in Jahia 8.
• User Authentication Bottlenecks: Their manual user management system was inefficient, requiring a move to a centralized SSO/SAML solution.
• Data Volume: A massive production site export (over 9GB) that slowed down environment replication and backup processes.

Our Solution

Gladtek implemented a multi-phased strategy that prioritized speed and reliability:

1. Knowledge Transfer & Upskilling: Addressed a critical lack of OSGI expertise within the client’s internal team through intensive technical training, transforming an initially ‘OSGI illiterate’ group into a performing unit capable of maintaining modern Jahia 8 standards.
2. The “14-Day Sprint”: Using our internal migration blueprints, we completed the core migration of the main portal in just two weeks, including regression testing.
3. OSGI Modernization: We refactored the legacy module codebase to follow Jahia 8 best practices, improving maintainability and performance.
4. SSO/SAML Integration: Built upon the native Jahia SSO SAML implementation, we developed a highly customizable extension layer. By leveraging a specialized YAML configuration system, we successfully managed complex user migrations and role mapping, ensuring a surgical and frictionless authentication transition.
5. Custom Performance Tools: We developed a specialized search and export utility that reduced the production export size from 9GB to 4GB.

The Impact

The results were transformative for the IT and marketing teams:

• Enhanced Team Performance: The technical dev team’s efficiency was significantly boosted following our training, moving them from legacy patterns to modern, high-performance OSGI development.
• Drastic Replication Improvements: Optimized environment replication processes, reducing the time required from 6 days down to just 2 days.
• Operational Efficiency: We eliminated 95% of manual technical requests from content editors by providing them with self-service custom tools.
• Clean Backlog: We identified and documented over 150 actionable improvements, creating a clear roadmap for the future.

Detailed Results

• Completed Jahia 7 to 8 migration in 2 weeks with zero regressions
• Implemented SSO eliminating manual user creation
• Reduced production export size from 9GB to 4GB
• Cut environment replication time by 4 days
• Eliminated 95% of technical requests with custom search utility
• Led and mentored the internal development team to ensure long-term technical autonomy
• Created 150+ Jira tickets and full backlog