Modernizing a leading business school’s website

In partnership with Evolving Web, HEC Montréal has transformed its digital presence with a new Drupal-powered website that reflects the full depth of academic life. With over 150 programs at its core, the institution needed a CMS that would connect programs with courses, departments, faculty, and classes, while also sharing news, events, and resources for tens of thousands of students, prospective students, staff members, and the general public. Through close collaboration and effective and continuous training with Evolving Web, HEC Montréal’s internal teams gain the skills to design, build, and manage this complex ecosystem. The result is a modern, flexible, and integrated platform that centralizes content, streamlines processes, and empowers the school to manage its digital presence independently.

Founded in 1907, HEC Montréal is a bilingual public business school affiliated with the Université de Montréal. It is the first established school of management in Canada and is recognized internationally for excellence in teaching and research. The school offers more than 150 programs and serves nearly 14,000 students from around the world. Its website is a critical tool for showcasing academic offerings, connecting with students and faculty, and sharing news and events.

HEC Montréal set out to replace its outdated custom CMS with a sustainable and future-ready platform. The school wanted to transition to a modern, open-source CMS that they could maintain independently in the long-term. The platform needed to support a large volume of academic content and program information, and provide efficient workflows for content management, multilingual publishing, and SEO.

HEC Montréal’s previous CMS was no longer viable, and the complexity of their content—spanning 10,000+ pages, multiple subsites, and highly interlinked program and course information—required a more flexible content management platform. There was a desire for the internal team to be self-sufficient on a new CMS and a sustainable design system. Close coordination between Evolving Web and HEC Montréal’s dedicated project management and leadership teams was essential to align goals, manage scope, and ensure visibility throughout the project.

Evolving Web partnered with HEC Montréal to build a future-ready Drupal platform while embedding training and collaboration at every stage. Our goal was not just to deliver a new website, but to enable HEC Montréal’s teams to take ownership of the platform.

Our work included:

• Progressive training and collaboration: a 9-week training program covering Drupal site building, workflows, theming, and module development through bilingual live sessions. From there, HEC Montréal’s developers became fully embedded in the build process, gaining hands-on experience to prepare for long-term autonomy.
• Continuous training for the digital communications team, teaching them how to create, manage, and optimize content as the site evolved.
• QA for training track (to be delivered later in the year) that includes live sessions, documentation, and best practices to strengthen testing and quality control.
• Custom integrations with HEC Montréal’s internal API to automatically pull in course descriptions regularly, avoiding manual content entry and duplicated content.
• Implementing editoria11y, an accessibility testing tool to help content editors to validate content before publishing.
• A continuous approach to delivery, allowing us to conduct UAT (user acceptance testing) and get feedback from the client earlier in the project and adjust the deliverables to better meet the needs of the project and HEC Montréal staff.
• Component-based design review, working closely with HEC Montréal’s design team to orient designs around reusable, CMS-ready components and established a living style guide in Figma.
• A large reusable component library including hero banners, content cards, accordions, carousels, testimonial quotes, program selectors, search filters, and course lists, giving editors the flexibility to create engaging pages without custom development.
• Content reusability, with advanced features such as tokens, a paragraph library, and reusable program elements to reduce duplication and ensure consistency.
• Extreme content flexibility, including an enhanced CKEditor with embedded components, background management, and spacing controls to give editors fine-grained control over layout and presentation.
• Phased launch with Cloudflare, with a strategy to gradually transition traffic from the legacy CMS to Drupal, ensuring a smooth rollout while new sections of the site are released.
• Implementing measures to meet Quebec's web accessibility and language standards for parapublic organizations.
• A new content model and governance, with structured content types (programs, courses, news, events, landing pages) and taxonomies to support scalability and editorial governance.

HEC Montréal now operates a robust, user-friendly Drupal website that reflects the richness and vibrancy of academic life. The platform supports flexible content creation, multilingual publishing, and modern SEO practices.

HEC Montréal’s teams are no longer just users of the platform, they are active builders. The development team has gained hands-on experience to manage and extend the site, while the digital communications team confidently creates and optimizes content using a wide library of components. A QA training program is in place to further strengthen internal quality control processes.

From a technical perspective, HEC Montréal benefits from a highly flexible, component-driven CMS with strong reusability features, a phased launch strategy for minimal disruption, and compliance with all accessibility requirements. With these foundations, HEC Montréal is equipped not only with a powerful website but with the skills and systems to evolve it independently for years to come.