This presentation will cover tips and best practices to use during the RFP process to ensure you find the best possible Drupal development partners for your business needs. It will cover the key areas to help optimize your RFP and vet potential vendors. Topics will include key areas to focus on with the Drupal partner selection process to ensure they can check all the important boxes including process for designing the admin experience for content authors, content migration methods and recommendations, large content site and multi-site management approaches, experience with Drupal hosting, security and approaches to ongoing support. Attendees will learn how to inquire about the vendor’s process for developing admin requirements, but also dive into their design process. Drupal is highly customizable, and the relationship between Drupal development and an organization’s authors should be highly collaborative. At the end of this session, attendees will know how to define the proper requirements to ask of vendors to ensure their Drupal chops bring forth a user-first approach to content authoring as well as content scalability. Attendees will learn how to look closely at the vendor’s portfolio and dive into their case studies on enterprise end-to-end redesigns and work with consolidating multiple sites into one Drupal install. Some developers can design a great microsite in Drupal, but it doesn’t mean they know how to scale an enterprise solution. You need a partner who understands how to develop with longevity and your future growth in mind. They’ll be thinking about flexible pages and content modules, workflow, performance and ease of updates. It’s also important to inquire about third-party integration and methods for importing and managing your external data. At the end of this session, attendees will have a checklist and understanding of development vendor prerequisites to vet to ensure their partner will bring forth a highly flexible and scalable Drupal architecture. A vendor’s experience and partnership with a Drupal hosting and support partner is important, but take it a step further. Investigate the vendor’s ability to configure environments and troubleshoot issues. Do they have their own hosting and support recommendations or solution? Their own cloud and security team? Moreover, how are they going above and beyond to keep your data safe? What are their methods for data encryption? What levels of data privacy compliance do they uphold? What is their process and approach to keeping your site up-to-date on the latest version of Drupal and applying module updates? Attendees will leave this session armed with the important criteria to help determine if your Drupal vendor is accounting for the proper hosting, security and support offerings to keep your site highly performing and safe.