BT Consumer
Introduction of the Portal
BT has developed and launched a new and improved developer portal to support and promote the growing API strategy across all business units within the company.
The portal provides a one stop shop for anyone wanting to integrate, either to use our network and customer base to provide B2B2C services. Or to simply use one of our numerous APIs.
Targeting both business development users and technical developers, the site offers information regarding our range of API products from case studies and marketing content to technical reference documentation on how our APIs work. Upon registration, visitors can instantly test out some of our most popular APIs by building apps with test data, free of charge.
Once on-boarded, partners can access both monetised and non-monetised production APIs through the portal.
The site is a destination for external developers, but also used internally by BT developers, providing access to documentation and the ability to build apps.
Due to the complexity of APIs we are able to if needed have a customised app creation process for each API, that allows us to collect additional information from customers needed for certain APIs, within the digital experience. Also federate out approvals to our account managers for API access (so no scaling issues).
Key features of the site include:
• Marketing content and case studies to attract new business
• Rendered OpenAPI Spec, API reference documentation for developer audiences
• Sandbox and Production environments all in one place
• ‘My Apps’ area for developers to access built apps and keys
• SSO for BT employees
• Business led workflows for onboarding customers and app approvals
• Adobe tracking for site analytics
Why nominated
Best use of Monetisation
- The portal enables BT’s business teams to grant access to monetised APIs and rate plans without support from technical teams which reduces the overhead on our technical teams, speeds the approval workflow and encourages re-use of common rate plans and products.
- Previously all apps were created by support teams which relied on emails and forms being exchanged internally.
Monetisation on the new developer portal is managed via provision of rate plans, set up in our API Gateway platform and made available to developers on the portal via our ‘developer category’ feature. A user can be assigned to a specific developer category by a BT account manager, giving them access to a range of rate plans, from which they can then purchase and build apps from. It also enables our customers to know exactly what rate plans they are on and all APIs available to them within those rate plans.
Best internal dev portal
- The internal adoption of the portal was always going to be dependent on making things as simple as possible for the teams that create and document our APIs.
As part of the API Portal programme, we created new standards for documentation based on Open API Specifications. This has meant fundamental changes to how APIs are created and documented and how tools such as Gitlab are used across the organisation.
- BT developers are able to automatically push changes to an API specification from Gitlab to the portal as well as setting portal attributes such as brand and categorisation. BT product managers receive notification of any change and review the content before publishing it.
- All BT people are automatically logged into the portal using their corporate credentials, BT’s own identity system manages the access rights for BT users and manages processes such as leavers and access level reviews.
- Our portal makes use of single sign-on for all internal users. This enables our internal users to easily sign into the portal and have access to all documentation at the click of a button rather than having to remember passwords or account details. Through authentication and permission controls, some content is restricted for view by internal BT employees only. In parallel, the portal also integrates with the BT customer ID, ensuring external users need only a single BT ID to register and access the portal along with any other areas of the BT estate they may require an account for.
Best use of API gateway integration
- BT is bound by regulations to keep data from different areas of the business separate from each other, however we want to offer a ‘one stop shop’ for all APIs across the company.
- We achieved this by building multi-org support into the portal. Each business unit in BT has separate ‘orgs’ in Apigee and this keeps the data separate. The portal is able to support these simultaneously and developer are granted access to create apps in the relevant Apigee ‘org’ by their account manager. This complexity is hidden from the developer.
- The outcome is a seamless experience for our customers and segregated data for our regulatory obligations.
BT has sought to utilise all of the best features of Apigee and build upon them where necessary. The portal creates a link between the Apigee products, apps and portal documentation so that whatever the complexity, it is easy to track between these components.
