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April 26, 2012 By Jessica Meyer Maria
For the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA), the decision to dump its aging content management system (CMS) was easy. Running 65 state government websites on two different versions of proprietary software — Vignette 6 and 7, one of which is no longer supported — had become cumbersome and costly. And moving all sites to Vignette 8 was too much of a “force fit,” said state CTO Steve Nichols.
Instead of buying another proprietary package, Georgia chose an open solution that’s quickly gaining favor among state and federal agencies. “As we dug in, all the obvious best choices were open source,” said Nichols. The strongest of those contenders turned out to be Drupal, which powers Whitehouse.gov and other key federal government sites.
Though the deployment is only midway through completion, Nikhil Deshpande — director of Georgia.gov Interactive, an office within the GTA — could not be happier. “I would absolutely recommend Drupal as an option, based on this experience,” he said.
“In looking for a new CMS for all 65 websites, we had to meet important criteria,” explained Deshpande. “No. 1, it had to be an enterprise solution. Second, we needed to move off the proprietary model that had become too expensive. Last, we looked for a solution with major market share. What really sold us on Drupal was its enormous market share in government and the public sector in general. The success of all the federal government sites convinced us.”
Drupal powers more than 150 sites for the federal government, including the White House; the House of Representatives; NASA; and the departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Health, Defense, Justice, Transportation, Homeland Security and Agriculture. It was perhaps the 2009 decision to move Whitehouse.gov and its associated sites to Drupal that gave the open source platform its biggest boost and gave other government agencies the confidence they needed to follow suit. To date, 34 state and territory agencies also use Drupal, with every new adopter solidifying the offering and creating new avenues for innovation.
The Department of Energy, for instance, moved to Drupal when it became clear that Energy.gov needed immediate attention: Traffic was low, bounce rates were high and the site design focused around an internal office structure that was notoriously difficult to navigate. 
Photo: Cammie Croft, director of new media and citizen engagement, Office of New Media, U.S. Department of Energy. Photo courtesy of Cammie Croft.
“The prior CMS supporting Energy.gov was outdated,” said Cammie Croft, director of new media and citizen engagement for the department’s Office of New Media. “To make matters worse, I discovered that the Energy Department had lots of outdated digital technologies. I sought a solution that would be able to scale and adapt to many requirements — those known and those yet to be discovered. I wanted a solution that would empower the Energy Department to evolve and develop as quickly as our users’ needs.”
The Energy.gov build has resulted in cost savings upward of $10 million annually to taxpayers, through the consolidation of duplicative digital technology platforms and expensive internal hosting solutions, along with using the Drupal platform to disseminate information for new initiatives, rather than building new, stand-alone websites. If it’s good enough for the federal government, some say, isn’t it good enough for any government agency?
Drupal open source software is maintained and developed by a community of more than 630,000 global users and developers. Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Drupal is free to download, use and share.
“I classify Drupal as an open source Web infrastructure and complete social publishing platform,” said Michael Caccavano, developer-turned-CEO of the Treehouse Agency, the vendor responsible for Energy.gov and other Drupal government projects.
Because it’s open source, Drupal works to remove silos and barriers to innovative development through collaboration, making it ideal in the government sphere. In the private sector, to be sure, there is no advantage to giving a competing business any intellectual property, but in the public sector it’s the opposite. The more government agencies that share code through Drupal, the more every agency using Drupal benefits.
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http://www.govtech.com/policy-management/Why-Big-Sites-Run-Drupal.html
Isn't it a little bizarre to offer an article on "why big sites run Drupal" without mentioning any other CMS's except (briefly) Sharepoint? Why don't big sites run Joomla? When Whitehouse.Gov did their evaluation of open source CMS there were some valid reasons, but since then Joomla has become more enterprise ready. It remains a lot more user friendly and has a better UI without major modifiction. So almost all the arguments for Drupal apply to Joomla as well. The article seems like an ad for big Drupal consulting firms, without providing a real rationale for using it. I'm not really interested in proselytizing for Joomla but not so much as mentioning it in an article like this seems like a gift to those who actually do make a profit from Drupal.
Not a fan of Sharepoint and it is way too expensive. Drupal is good, I think Wordpress is better though...
powerfull cms drupal....... n great module.. cetek.web.id
Besides federal offices, a lot of UN organizations, agencies and programmes are using Drupal since quite a while. Find an overview here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/79093
3100 government sites using open source cms listed here http://bit.ly/lQmpes
You do also know there's a group of Drupal (and other open source projects) in government called Drupal4Gov. We've been around since October of 2010 and we work to share information, code and help with open source projects. We have held coding sprints, meetups and on May 18th, our first Government Drupal Day will be held at the Department of Commerce. Yesterday, we finalized the schedule and will have additional projects there, not just Drupal. But, my favorite piece for the day, is the all day Security room that will focus on open source projects and security requirements.
"In the private sector, to be sure, there is no advantage to giving a competing business any intellectual property, but in the public sector it’s the opposite." This is a misconception. If there weren't an advantage in the private sector companies like Google, IBM, Red Hat, Intel, AMD, and even Microsoft wouldn't be players. The advantage is that you can leverage an existing body of work that would cost billions of investment to replicate, in exchange for potentially providing a competitor with a minimal contribution. What you gain is less than what you give to your competitor. However, for the Government it is a pure gain.
While many open source competitors exist in the CMS arena there are also many proprietary commercial ventures touting their own special CMS (ref www.cmsmatrix.org/). I have been developing software for more than a few decades. A lot of the developers have a sign painted on their heads which says "only my code". One thing I have learned over the years is that changes in technology will change how you work and how you develop software. Machine code ans assembler gave way to higher languages. COBOL shops became structured shops. The mythical man month has been shown to be a major issue in modern distributed development shops. The SRS has given way to Agile development. Those who refused to grasp the changes that simplify the process, improve development production and automate or have the code pre-built and allow simple changes to bring a system online quickly will loose. From my meager perspective Drupal offers a massive advantage as a starting point for site development beyond simple content. We have used it to produce fully integrated systems relying on binary replication of data from client server applications to the web interfaces. It has been stated as an industry standard that a developer produces about 10 lines of useable code each day. Anything that prevents the reinvention of the wheel gets a hands up salute from me. We reviewed over 35 CMS systems, open source and commercially available, before we settled on Drupal 4 years ago and have not looked back. Producing CRM, RFP, Business Accounting Systems and much more with 30% of the estimated effort to do the same in a completely custom platform, or some of the other CMS platforms we researched. I still like Drupal, can't wait for Drupal 8.
No, it's not bizarre that an article entitled, "Why Big Sites Run Drupal" talks about Drupal. I will however answer your silly questions: "Why isn't Sharepoint mentioned?" - What person in their right mind would want to run overpriced proprietary software made by an monopolistic institution with a track record of shite software and a relationship with ALEC? "Why don't big sites run Joomla?" - Because joomla is a toy. Once you get beyond the shiny theme you'll realize you get one content type, no taxonomy, and a load of wonky useless proprietary extensions/modules/components/plugins named woojomjamjigglit that have no support network.
Why would Joomla be mentioned here when it hasn't been proven in this space? It is an undisputed fact that Drupal has risen to the challenges of large enterprise government web applications time and time again. It's a more powerful message to say that "Drupal HAS done that" as opposed to "Joomla COULD do that". They are different platforms with different communities, so they shouldn't be treated as one in the same. If the tables were turned I'd be saying the same thing but in Joomla's favor.
Wordpress isn't a CMS. It's a blogging tool that provides some CMS features. You can't do structured content, taxonomies easily.
And, the Drupal4Gov conference on Friday was 'open source' as well. It was totally free to all participants, funded by a lot of great vendors who have embraced Drupal and see that it is the platform of choice for many and want to see it continue to grow and mature. It was organized by both Government and private sectors members who volunteered their time to put the event together. It was a great opportunity to get some of the best drupalers together. Check out Drupal4Gov and get involved !