Universidad de La Sabana needed a digital ecosystem that could serve the diversity of its audiences and academic units. Its Typo3 platform could not.

Universidad de La Sabana has been an esinergia client since November 2023. What follows describes not only the technical migration off Typo3, but what more than two and a half years of continuous operation reveal about the underlying architectural decision: when a university grows, its digital ecosystem cannot stay on a single institutional portal.

The Typo3 platform limited the evolution of design and user experience at the pace the institution required, support and maintenance accumulated growing risk and cost, and integration with critical services such as the institutional CRM became difficult on the existing infrastructure. Beyond the institutional portal, the University required a virtual campus with regulatory compliance from the Ministry of Education, a dedicated space for the Clínica Universidad de La Sabana, and two native digital outlets for the School of Communication (Conexión Sabana 360 and Unisabana 360). Five academic sites with distinct audiences and demands, all to be consolidated into a coherent DXP ecosystem.

An academic DXP ecosystem on Drupal and Acquia Cloud

We architected and migrated La Sabana's digital ecosystem off Typo3 onto an enterprise DXP on Drupal and Acquia Cloud Platform, with Acquia Site Studio as the visual composition layer and Acquia DAM as the centralized asset manager. The architecture distributes five academic sites across three coordinated codebases: the first runs in multisite the main Unisabana.edu.co portal alongside the Clínica Universidad de La Sabana portal; the second runs the Campus Virtual Unisabana with regulatory compliance from the Ministry of Education; and the third runs in multisite the School of Communication with Conexión Sabana 360 as the digital news outlet and Unisabana 360 as the School's corporate portal. All integrated with the institution's critical services, including the CRM. The implementation was recognized at the Acquia Awards 2026 as a finalist in the Best Use of AI for Learning & Acceleration category.

One nuance worth naming: governing five sites across three coordinated codebases sounds like technical efficiency, but those five sites are nothing alike. One is regulated by the Ministry of Education, two are institutional portals with distinct audiences, and two operate with editorial newsroom logic and a school's corporate communication logic. Deciding what gets centralized and what gets released to each academic unit is not a technical decision, it is institutional. It took time, iterations, and adjustments in production before it held.

Five sites across three coordinated codebases, +40% less publication time, and full MEN regulatory compliance.

The platform does not deliver its value the day the five sites go live. It delivers it when the School of Communication publishes its first story in Conexión Sabana 360 without depending on the central technical team, when the Campus Virtual Unisabana meets the Ministry of Education regulatory requirements without additional adjustments, and when a new site like Unisabana 360 can go into production on the same technical foundation without rebuilding the platform. Three results sustain that observation.