Integrating Drupal with Dynamics for Bexley Council

The clientanchor

The London Borough of Bexley is a local authority in Southeast London.

They are responsible for delivering a wide range of services to its residents and businesses. The council is committed to improving service efficiency and accessibility through ongoing digital transformation.

The challengeanchor

Bexley Council relies on Microsoft Dynamics 365 as its core data management platform, however much of this data is replicated across multiple systems across the council’s digital estate - such as service listings, amenities and public venues. This duplication of this data creates risks around data integrity, requires significant manual maintenance, and adversely impacts operational efficiency.
The council sought to re-architect its data integration strategy to position Microsoft Dynamics as the single source of truth, with downstream systems (including its Drupal 10 website) pulling and submitting data in real time.
To support this, we were tasked with:

• Enhancing Bexley’s numerous citizen-facing webforms to pull taxonomic data and controlled vocabularies directly from Dynamics via API to populate the forms’ various dropdowns, radio and checkbox selections
• Ensuring bidirectional data flow between webforms and Dynamics
• Improving address accuracy through OS Places integration
• Introducing an email verification element to strengthen data quality and user trust

Our approachanchor

• Discovery & Planning: Engaged stakeholders across IT and service delivery teams to understand integration requirements, existing constraints, and key user journeys
• API Integration & Caching: Built custom Drupal webform components to dynamically pull data from Microsoft Dynamics via REST APIs. To ensure responsiveness and reduce API load, we implemented smart caching mechanisms to prefetch and temporarily store lookup data
• Enhanced Form Features: Integrated the OS Places API to provide live address lookups and selection, improving both accuracy and UX. Developed a secure email verification component requiring users to confirm their email via a unique code
• Iterative Agile Delivery: Delivered the work in sprints using agile methods — iterating quickly based on feedback and ensuring early visibility of integration outcomes
• Collaborative Testing: Partnered closely with Bexley for thorough UAT, validating both the technical performance and usability of each feature before deployment

The outcomesanchor

• Integrated Data Architecture: Microsoft Dynamics now serves as a true central system, with public forms dynamically drawing and writing data - significantly reducing duplication and errors
• Streamlined Operations: Manual data reconciliation is now minimal, and council teams spend less time maintaining separate data stores across systems
• Improved Experience: Thousands of submissions have been processed through the updated forms with higher data quality and faster turnaround

Key technologies & toolsanchor

• Microsoft Dynamics 365
• REST APIs
• OS Places
• Drupal 10
• Custom caching logic
• Secure email verification module