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Cross-case - Service Portal Digital Experience Powered By Jahia

Smith Drugs

From legacy portal to Jahia, with low switch cost and no downtime

How a next-day pharmaceutical wholesaler migrated two order-critical B2B portals to Jahia in 5 months, kept its Angular apps intact, and never missed a peak-hour order window.

 

Two portals, one next-day promise

©Smithdrugs

Smith Drug Company is a $1 billion B2B pharmaceutical wholesaler serving independent pharmacies, long-term care facilities, and select regional chains. Its core promise is next-day delivery: pharmacies order in the evening, trucks run overnight, and stock is on the shelf by morning.

The company runs two e-commerce platforms. SmithDrug.com is the flagship full-catalog site, covering the Mississippi River to the East Coast from four distribution centers. IntegralRx is a nationwide, generics-only site shipping via UPS. Both are transactional order portals, not brochure sites: 1,000 to 2,000 logged-in pharmacy users place 2,000 to 3,000 orders a day across roughly 20,000 SKUs, in a regulated environment (DEA verification, state licensing, partial HIPAA).

If a portal is down between 5 and 8 PM, when pharmacies close and submit their final orders, customers simply route the order to another wholesaler and the sale is lost.

20,000
SKUs in catalog

3000
orders per day

5
months to migrate

A renewal they couldn't justify

Mire

In late 2024, Smith Drug was told that renewing its existing portal license would cost about 8 x the current rate. It was non-negotiable and impossible to justify. That was the trigger, but the platform had a deeper problem underneath it. Its content management layer was effectively unusable for anyone outside the development team.

Every content update, from drug recall notices to shortage advisories, return-restriction alerts, and holiday closures, needed a developer to publish it. Marketing could not publish on its own, and IT was carrying work that was never their job.

The replacement had to do four things at once: keep the existing Angular applications without a rewrite, keep both order portals live through the switch, hand content publishing back to the teams who own it, and fit within roughly 6 months and the existing budget.

The deciding proof of concept

Target

Smith Drug looked at several options before deciding. The hard requirement across all of them was that any new platform had to work with the existing Angular applications, because there was no time for a full rewrite. What settled it was a proof of concept run by Jahia's team, which showed the Angular apps could move into Jahia with very little change.

Jahia won on a combination the other options could not match together: it fit the existing stack, it gave non-technical teams a content tool they could actually use, it could deliver inside the deadline, and its pricing matched the existing budget instead of multiplying it. The quality of Jahia's support mattered just as much. Smith Drug values a close, responsive relationship with the Jahia team, with quick answers and calls scheduled fast whenever an issue comes up.

"The proof of concept was the huge differentiator. They've been wonderful"
- Stephen Semethy, Lead Developer, Smith Drug Company

Migrate, don't rewrite

©Smithdrugs

The approach was a deliberate "lift and shift": take the existing Angular applications and bring them into Jahia with no functional redesign, keeping everything that already worked and spending no time on rewrites.

Both sites ran in parallel. Work began in April 2025. SmithDrug.com, the smaller of the two, went live that fall. IntegralRx followed, with about 90% of customers migrated and full cutover expected within days. Identity runs through LDAP.

There was a real learning curve early on, but once the team learned the platform's patterns, delivery sped up, with Jahia's team helping on the harder problems. The packaging model was close enough to the team's previous practice that day-to-day work was not disrupted.

The result

List
  • No outages caused by Jahia, and no incidents during the critical 5 to 8 PM window, the period when any downtime would send pharmacies to another wholesaler.
  • Daily deployments are faster and smoother. Smith Drug deploys almost every night and calls the workflow "much easier than before."
     
  • Real savings on cost. Smith Drug kept its previous price and gained more services, while avoiding a renewal that would have cost eight times as much. 
     
  • Marketing will be able to  publish on its own. Time-sensitive updates like recalls, shortage alerts, return notices, and holiday messages can go live without waiting on a developer.
     
  • Sales gained a new B2B workflow. The team uses user impersonation to log into a pharmacy's account, review orders, and help troubleshoot, while being blocked from placing orders on the customer's behalf.

So far it's been very stable. We've not had any issues.

— Stephen Semethy, Lead Developer, Smith Drug Company

What this project shows

No need to rebuild everything to modernize a critical portal. Smith Drug brought its existing applications into Jahia without a rewrite, keeping both portals running throughout the switchover.

The real gain is not only technical. By handing content back to business teams, Jahia frees IT from an editing job that was never theirs, and marketing publishes recalls and alerts without waiting on anyone.

Service continuity comes first. When an outage between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. sends an order to a competitor, zero incidents since go-live is worth as much as any new feature.

Changing platforms does not mean costs blow up. On a flat budget, Smith Drug avoided a license bill multiplied by eight, and gained services along the way.

AI-assisted migration shortens the path even further. A project like this one can now be done in under 5 months.

Do you run critical portals your business cannot afford to lose?

See how Jahia helps teams migrate without a rewrite and without downtime, and give publishing back to the people who own it. With AI-assisted migration, a project like this one can go even faster than 5 months.

Talk to a Jahia expert