|
Videos
April 26, 2012 By Jessica Meyer Maria
Still many agencies remain wary of Drupal, because they fear it means giving up their reliance on Microsoft Windows and/or SharePoint and moving entirely toward a LAMP stack solution, or undergoing a complicated integration that requires very different skill sets for maintenance. There may also be resistance to make the move for agencies in the midst of long Windows software contracts, as often agencies already own SharePoint as part of an existing deal.
But Drupal’s ability to integrate is “limitless,” said Treehouse Agency’s Caccavano. “It is very compatible with other solutions and services. That’s probably one of its greatest strengths.”
“There are pros and cons to each,” said Chris Johnson, general manager for Microsoft Gold Partner Provoke, and former technical product manager for Microsoft. “And IT spending on Microsoft licensing is typically only 3 percent of an IT budget.”
“There are still very real hindrances to Drupal adoption in government,” said Phase2’s Walpole. “There is a sort of entrenched software industry model, with technology stacks, licensing and entrenched vendors, in part due to long procurement cycles in government. Agencies tend to favor vendors over solutions. But Drupal is as much a framework as it is a product. It is highly customizable and doesn’t necessarily fit within a known purchasing system.”
All that said, however, the “bully pulpit” of the White House is immensely powerful, Croft said. That project helped to spawn a talent pool of Drupal engineers, qualified to work on complex government projects.
With big federal government success stories, state and local governments are finding that they too can ride the Drupal wave. One reason Drupal can be so easily tailored to very large and small deployments is that it works on a modular system. “Distributions” are sets of bundled modules, features and functionalities, geared toward a specific audience. OpenPublic, an open source CMS based on Drupal developed by the team at Phase2 Technology, is the most popular example tailored to the needs of government.
The Oregon Arts Commission and Oregon Cultural Trust (OCT) recently launched new sites using Drupal, in a move away from using Dreamweaver as a platform. Shannon Planchon, assistant director for the Oregon Arts Commission, said Drupal’s attractiveness is in the freedom it allows, the level of staff involvement and its sophistication. The original sites could not be managed in-house, and for the OCT in particular, as a marketing site that needs to be refreshed and updated frequently, it was critical to move to Drupal.
Although cost savings for the commission and OCT are hard to quantify at this stage, Planchon said that with Drupal, they have more control and a more responsive site. Georgia’s enterprise CMS, by comparison, is expected to result in enormous cost savings, through reuse of much of the initial development, reduction of redundancy and lack of licensing costs. “We had to justify the migration with a business case,” said Georgia.gov Interactive’s Deshpande. “Over the next five years, [total cost of ownership] savings will be approximately $14 million.”
Today, Drupal is a proven solution that has been leveraged at the federal, state and local levels to address key challenges. Structured in a way that supports integration with proprietary systems and third-party solutions, Drupal allows real and powerful access to system functions, as well as enormous customization, without changing core code.
The outlook for Drupal is positive, considering its tremendous growth within the public sector. “Just look at the White House and now the state of Georgia,” said Forum One’s Voelker. “Once a technology starts making those kinds of inroads, you’re looking at a time horizon of half a decade, at least.”
Editor’s Note: After being interviewed for this article, Treehouse Agency and Phase2 Technology merged. Phase2 CEO Jeff Walpole will remain CEO, and Michael Caccavano, CEO of Treehouse Agency, assumed the role of president of Phase2.
You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
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 !
DotNetNuke should warrant serious consideration for sny org running a Microsoft server environment. Their community is just as large, if not larger than Drupal.