Why is drupal an ideal open source cms for an enterprise

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Table of Content
About Drupal -- - - ------------------------------------------------------ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 3
Overview of Drupal -------------------------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 3
So what makes Drupal a strong t for enterprise websites? ----------------------------------------------- 5
Game for bene ts? With Drupal there are truckloads of them for an enterprise ------- 5
Cost e ective -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5
Standards Compliant ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5
Supported ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5
Here to stay ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5
What enterprise adopters say about Drupal --------------------------------------------------------------- 6
Key features of Drupal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6
Security --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7
Ease of use ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7
Enterprise Search ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8
Integration with Content Delivery Platforms ----------------------------------------------------- 9
Drupal is scalable ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 9
Content Management ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11
So what is it that makes Drupal a strong & viable product ------------------------------------------------ 12
Backed up by Acquia to be enterprise ready ------------------------------------------------------------- 12
The Drupal Ecosystem ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 13
So what do customers, markets & analysts say about Drupal ------------------------------------------- 14
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Externally Facing Social Software ------------------------------ 15
Social Networking for Businesses ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 16
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace --------------------- 16
eDynamic’s Expertise on Drupal ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 18
About eDynamic ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 20

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Why is Drupal an Ideal Open Source CMS for an enterprise

About Drupal
Drupal’s social publishing system found its niche place
amongst many. After being downloaded over 2 million times
since its commencement, it moots its supremacy over 400,000 Standards Compliants
web sites globally. Inclusive of an enterprise class content
management system, Drupal delivers an array of web ACCESSIBLE
applications boasting of single or multi-user blogs, wikis,
community networks, digital media portals, e-commerce, the MODULAR
works! A magnanimous percentage of companies today are
totally addicted to its use. Biggies like SonyBMG, Warner STABLE
Brothers Records, the New York Observer, Forbes, Disney, Intel,
Harvard University, and Amnesty International are but a few
names that have succumbed to its charms. It’s not surprising to
FREE
monitor a gigantic community that swears by Drupal, with
thousands of active contributors vying for its open source
technology.

Overview of Drupal
Intriguingly, Drupal began its journey as a college experiment. In the year 2000, when
permanent Internet connections were scarce and those that were demanded a premium
for some Universities; a wireless bridge between student dorms was set-up for sharing an
ADSL modem connection amongst a bunch of roomies. As word spread gradually, work
began on a small news site with a built-in Web board, allowing a larger group of friends to
leave each other notes and messages. As the technology spread even further, naming
conventions were formed, and a suitable domain name was on the cards. Dries Buytaert,
an open-source software programmer and the founder and lead of the Drupal CMS then
thought of placing a name for his Web board, and he settled in for 'drop.org' after he made
a typo to see if the name 'dorp.org' was still available. Dorp is the Dutch word for 'village',
something he thought was be tting for the small community. As days ew by, the
message board, which got its name, thanks to a typo, which evolved in to an open source
project, was named Drupal in 2001. Drupal actually is a name derived from the Dutch word
"druppel", meaning "drop" or a water droplet.

Written in PHP, the Open Source content management system runs on a LAMP stack, now
empowering close to 200,000 public facing Web sites with numerous other sites tucked

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safely under its belt. Needless to mention it is a familiar name all across the world, with an
ever growing number of contributors.

Being a powerful platform, Drupal is one open source content management system that
allows users to easily publish, manage and share a wide variety of content on the Internet.
What’s more, Drupal is also excitingly exible! You can create corporate and community
websites in a ash, while managing teams, host discussions, run polls, communicate and
use innumerable forms of productivity-enhancing features with minimal e ort.

A brilliant mix of the traditional web content management features and the now-so
important social features, the tool also enables open communication and participation.
While its exibility helps a tad lot of applications, its modularity provides a strong foothold
for companies seeking to build sites at lightning speed and at lower cost than most others.
Drupal is perhaps the ideal platform, where dynamic features like question-and-answer
forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools work e ciently while bonding with
the site's infrastructure.

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So what makes Drupal a strong fit for enterprise websites?
No guesses for bagging that one really as Drupal is truly the ideal open source CMS for
managing large-scale enterprise websites. Thus to reiterate in brief, it provides the
following:

1. Rapid business sector adoption
2. Modular architecture
3. No vendor lock-in
4. Backed-up by an expert company - Acquia
5. Community supported

Game for bene ts? With Drupal there are truckloads of them for an enterprise

Cost e ective
As is with any tool, Drupal is a free and open-source that is a bit of both. At lower costs,
such that doesn’t mandate any licensing fee, the system is immensely traditional to vendor
solutions. Moreover, Drupal sprints on LAMP stack, so while you save your moolah on
hosting, you also save an awful lot on web servers and databases. What’s even better is
that you aren’t limited to LAMP alone, as Drupal marries itself with just about any other
platform.

Standards Compliant
It also uses standard-compliant methods such as XHTML, segregation of content and
layouts through CSS along with squeaky clean URLs that make sites more accessible and
improve search engine ranking.

Supported
There is an active developer and user community that participates in mailing lists, forums,
and IRC. Acquia supports the developers and the community by o ering support and
development using Drupal. Acquia Drupal by the way is the free, packaged Drupal
distribution that provides a quick on-ramp for building Drupal websites.

Here to stay
While Drupal has been in this tumultuous and continuous development for over eight
years, the same group of primary developers have re ned and improved the code quite
recently.

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While this version encourages more people to create additional modules, the group also
contributes patches, and writes vital documentation.

Murmur has it (something that’s been rather a roar than a murmur really!) that its growing
momentum has been noticed by several new corporate websites. For several companies,
their innate wish is to handle their project - the Drupal way.

What enterprise adopters say
about Drupal
There are several challenges when
new software, tool or even an
application is born. And then there
are some that are sure shot
winners. Drupal, must we add, is
one of them. Here’s why:

1. Its fully integrated social
tools are tied to one’s
content
2. There’s always an
avoidance to a vendor
lock-in
3. It’s a new breed, en
route to being one of
the fastest platform
4. Being fast, Drupal is also
wonderfully scalable
5. What’s more – it also
encompasses a large
pool of available talent.
Could you have asked for anything
more?

Key features of Drupal
To summarise here are some of Drupal’s key features.

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Security
Enterprise puts security rst. Drupal o ers a host of security features! These are fresh, out
of the box, and best of all, they are compatible with most commercial software.

1. Audit trails – This helps to keep track of the activities performed by users.
2. Content approval – Get pleased with editing content work ows.
3. Granular privileges – Set permissions, be on the prowl to demand and do what
you choose.
4. LDAP, NTLM, OpenID Authentication – There are over a zillion ways to log into
the site.
5. SSL compatible – Drupal also gives you the pleasure of running under HTTPS ,
completely and/or partially.

Ease of use
Software adoption and the learning curve is a major concern for most enterprises. While
not all of them go hand in hand, you are sure to get that solace with Drupal. It excels in
providing features and functionalities that make life a lot easier. It’s also breezy for the
content administrators managing the website.

1. Drag-n-Drop content –This one’s a quick and easy way to re-arrange, re-group
content using your mouse.
2. Image resizing – Change the image size automatically into pre-de ned
thumbnail sizes. As this feature alienates manual handling, images that are
de ned by you, stay that way!
3. Mass upload – This is one function that is simply too good to be true! All you do
is zip by, upload and process attachments and images all at one go!
4. WYSIWYG editor – While you edit content on a desktop word processor, you can
also interface with a robust toolbar of features.
5. Spell checker –Check content for any spelling errors as you go – without being
bound by the external software.

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Enterprise Search
Indulge in a scavenger hunt through all your web content including document
attachments of multiple le formats, auto-complete functionality, spelling suggestions
and customisable output of search results. Don’t ever let searching for stu be a pain!

Search
Amazon.com
Enter your Keywords
rob

Search Results

Robclosup Rob with Sandy D Rob with Peabo B

Search
Home >> William

Enter your Keywords
Wiliam Search

Search Results

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Integration with Content Delivery Platforms
Additionally, Drupal has modules that can integrate with BrightCove, Akamai and several
other content delivery platforms, all in all improving your website performance

Drupal is scalable
Drupal can run virtually on any database including MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and
Oracle, its scalability is only limited to the knowledge and experience of the technical sta
deploying the Drupal site. But what’s appealing is that Drupal can scale to support very
large enterprise websites.

While there's nothing preventing Drupal from being scaled across any number of web
servers, its scalability of open-source databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL is an
ongoing issue.

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Additionally, Drupal has modules that can integrate with BrightCove, Akamai and several
other content delivery platforms, all in all improving your website performance.

Replicating databases is not always the solution and nor is the reason to be contented
enough, so it’s no secret that a very small percentage of websites, daily user visits are
counted not in hundreds or thousands but score that’s much more.

As a platform, Drupal is a dream; without the apprehension of being built with a preset
volume of tra c or throughput. Moreover it is limitless on its scalability.

In fact, the current version of Drupal o ers several mouth-watering opportunities for
organizations to build and strengthen their scalability. In time to come, as the platform
matures, several die-hard developers will soon be eyeing opportunities based on Drupal’s
innate talent of scalability, rather than any particular module. Database sharding too is but
a prime example of Drupal development moving towards greater performance. Sharding
the database allows it to reside across multiple physical machines – e ectively removing
the traditional barrier to scalability.

Currently, Drupal proudly empowers about 1 percent of Websites, trailing WordPress,
running about 8.5 percent of the Web, according to sources.

What’s pivotal is to understand Drupal’s scalability there are other opportunities for
improvement. Open source software on the whole has the agility to meet challenges at
the pace of innovation. Several organizations are aghast with the sea-like exibility and
changes that have been created after the birth of Drupal and consequently, there are
several high decibel thoughts on software investment and ownership. We have listed
some of the bene ts, here’s what Drupal can also manage with Content Management:

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Content Management

1. It can create, manage and control content.
2. It can help in the usage of editorial work ows to manage content lifecycle.
3. It also possesses user templates to publish contents.
4. Untarnished document management.
5. Allows the storage and organization of documents, images, attachments –
virtually any content.

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So what is it that makes Drupal a strong &
viable product

Backed up by Acquia to be enterprise ready
Drupal is backed up by Acquia – a company
founded in 2007 by the original creator and
project lead of Drupal, Dries Bartaert.

Acquia engineers work with Drupal’s
community to x bugs, to implement missing
features, when they are not writing
documentation or helping sponsors and
organizing community events. Acquia’s success
is driven by the overall success of its
predecessor, Drupal whose project at large is a
story in itself, stands alone, una ected by the
demands of any one customer.

The company is thus able to look broadly across
Drupal as it identi es gaps to be lled in
contrast to other companies. Acquia today has
positioned itself as a strong contributor within
the community's overall e ort to make Drupal
even better. With every passing day, Acquia
invests into making Drupal enterprise a tad
more compatible than it was!

According to sources, selling services or hosting
software is the way to go for any company
doing business in open-source (RedHat, Bryght,
Zimbra to name a few), but the actual need
today lies in services surrounding products like
Drupal for sure. People need websites, but
companies use web agencies. Individuals use
blogs, geeks install Drupal themselves; the
charm of Drupal never seems to rest!

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The Drupal Ecosystem

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So what do customers, markets & analysts say about Drupal
Drupal's marketing resources provides market and promotional material for the software.
Drupal assists those who publish stories by providing anything from its logo to
informational lea ets or additional text and references for a report.

For starters, Drupal — no matter how friendly Acquia and the community make it — is still
a download and all you install is a bundle of software. It's also one known for having a fairly
steep learning curve. Analyst’s feel that the curve can be addressed to some extent, unless
there are changes made to the complete model altogether. However it is a fact that
Drupal’s download, con guration, installation and server management could possess
minor issues.

Staying abreast is a tall order for Drupal; one that can be dimmed that easily, as the web
content management system market becomes a crowded place.

On the ipside, Drupal has some great things going for it. The architecture has a grace
about it and with a thriving community, the LAMP platform too scores high. Open source is
increasingly accepted in the enterprise. With Acquia today there is lies a funded
organization working to make Drupal more attractive and critical to enterprise IT managers.

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Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Externally Facing Social Software
The social software market is evolving fast; at the point of being very rapid. In response to
this Gartner is working on a presentation that places each of the social software players on
a pedestal. It compares the di erent players in the enterprise market, including
open-source projects like Drupal.

As part of that process, Acquia was also invited to review the presentation and provide
comments about the social software landscape and of course on Drupal's success stories.
These success stories, important as they are in Gartner’s analysis, also help it positioning
Drupal against its ever growing competitors.
Gartner considers three di erent use cases for social software:

(i) Team collaboration software,
(ii) Community software and
(iii) Networking software.

Each of these scenarios has varied requirements that naturally emphasize its vivid features
of social software. User pro les and group support carry a lot of weight in their evaluations.
Thus in each of these use cases, Gartner considers two di erent deployment scenarios: (a)
sites inside the workplace and (b) externally facing websites.

While publishing their Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008 back in October 2007 at their
Gartner Symposium/ITXpo event, they mulled over the good fortune the IT industry had
garnered in the form of the Social Software category. The category included many di erent
point technologies including blogs, wikis, tagging, bookmarking, and social networking.

And the greatness about Drupal is that it does all of this AND more. It does traditional web
content publishing/management., it’s not blog software with wikis bolted on, nor is it wiki
software with blogs bolted on, or a web publishing/content management system with
wikis and blogs bolted on.

It is architecture for doing all of this and more, mashing them however you want. The
genius of what Dries and the community has done is to reduce all aspects of social software
to their core DNA; content nodes and membership, in building a platform that can be
in nitely extended to allow the assembly of almost any style of online social interaction.

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Social Networking for Businesses
Ideally speaking, Drupal is ably equipped to be used as a base system for creating a custom
social networking site like Facebook and MySpace. While these large social networks have
scratched their pug marks on niche social networking, the web sites in turn can help
promote businesses, products, projects, and hobbies of any nature.

Social Networking in the workplace is increasing annually at rapid paces, something that
has been re ected on the number of vendors creating new software or making their
existing products “socially-aware”. Drupal is perhaps another visionary in this process.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace
Gartner, Inc., the leading research and advisory rm, identi ed Drupal CMS as the pioneers
for Social Software in the Workplace." Here is an image of what that quadrant looks like:

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According to Gartner, Drupal did well enough last year in its intended area of the market to
merit a 'niche player' title. This year however they've managed to break the mould, say
sources.

According to Gartner, Drupal has its place amongst the visionaries’ quadrant because of its
consistent and e cient use of the open source model as it drives to popularly adopt and
provide enterprise services through organizations such as Acquia. A strong content-centric,
community and web application is the foundation that holds Drupal. It is also noted that
Gartner appreciated the software’s rapidly extending characteristics that embraces
hundreds of modules, including many that could be used for collaboration and social
interaction support.

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eDynamic’s Expertise on Drupal
Rated as a leading CMS product by Gartner, Forrester & other analyst rms, Drupal has
emerged as a leader of the pack among Open Source CMS Products with rapid adoption
globally. It is easy to assess Drupal’s e ortless means of creating content and seasoned
experience of dealing with websites. This not only helps you in achieving your business
goals but also aids in the spiralling sales and search engine visibility; all this while being
simple to integrate and administer.

eDynamic provides end to end services for Drupal CMS:
Consulting, Strategy & Roadmap for Drupal implementations
Solution Design, Development/Implementation and Deployment
Managed Services
Large & Multi-site/multiple website/portal implementations on Drupal
Content Migration
User Experience and Design
Re-platforming/Migration services from other CMS platforms to Drupal

eDynamic Di erentiators as Drupal Implementation Partner
eDynamic is uniquely positioned with proven expertise as one of the largest Drupal
implementers globally:
eDynamic has a Global Delivery Model with local and o shore teams that bring
unmatched cost & scale advantages to its Drupal customers.
eDynamic has one of the larger Drupal teams that can manage projects of
signi cant scale

eDynamic’s global delivery model provides exible engagement options to our customers
based on strategic needs, scale and budget:
Local – All local Drupal expertise from our o ces in New York, Phoenix, Los
Angeles and Toronto in North America, Dubai in the Middle East or New Delhi in
India.
Blended – A team of o shore resources are engaged to work in conjunction with
local/client site experts
O shore – A complete team of o shore experts who manage the
implementation
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Managed Services/Support Models

Design, Build and Run Model – eDynamic can manage websites and Drupal
applications from a support and maintenance perspective
Dedicated Seat Model – A dedicated team of o shore resources are provides to
manage and run websites & Drupal applications

eDynamic o ers end-to-end Drupal content management solutions for:

Corporate Websites
ePublishing
Social Media
Intranets
Knowledge Management
Document Management
Portals

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About eDynamic Web Strategy &
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Blend strategy, technology and creativity to deliver integrated, Web Design &
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for cornerstone strategies and critical Web initiatives.
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