World leaders using Drupal

I'm happy to share another gigantic win for Drupal; the World Economic Forum (the Forum) has launched their internal collaboration platform on Drupal. The Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders. It is best known for its annual meeting in Davos. Their World Economic Leaders Community (WELCOM) is where they will engage online to address the most pressing business and global challenges.

This means that the world's leaders are now using Drupal! They have just met at Davos where they first took their new collaboration platform to the test.

The Forum turned to Drupal since their existing closed-source solution, developed on top of last generation technologies, was not flexible enough. They wanted to add new features quickly, and their previous system just was not able to do so at their pace. Additionally The Forum's previous platform was a collection of different technologies, while good on their own, resulted in very poor performance for their site. So they turned to the advantages of open source technology, and Drupal, for solutions.

They decided to use Drupal Commons, a pre-configured Drupal distribution for social websites, as the technology platform for their community. Drupal Commons is social business software similar to Jive Software, that integrates groups, discussion forums, blogs, wikis, and events into a single pre-packaged solution. This allowed the Forum to quickly spin up a social collaboration community based off Drupal with the features they needed.

Their previous solution took several years to build, while the Drupal Commons solution was deployed in just several months.

Many organizations, including Nvidia, Symantec, Turner Broadcasting, and many others already use Drupal to power their community sites. Drupal Commons makes this process easier by packaging together key modules, content types and theme snippets into an installation profile that is ready to go out of the box. Because it's Drupal, organizations still have the flexibility to modify Commons to extend its capabilities, to turn features on/off and tap into the wealth of Drupal community resources.

So this is just the first step for the World Economic Forum – and we look forward to seeing what our world leaders will do next with Drupal.

Source:  Dries Buytaert

WhiteHouse.gov goes Drupal!

Quoted from TechPresident:

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

[ Read the Full Article ]

Dries Buytaert, the credited father of Drupal, also wrote on his blog about the process of working on the WhiteHouse.gov website. His company, Acquia, was brought on as a consultant on the site implementation.

[ Read the Full Post ]

This is truly a big day for Drupal, and the Open Source community as a whole. While Drupal has been represented in other government agency websites like the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, and the General Service Administration having representation at the very top level of the Government sends a very clear message that Open Source and Community contributed programming can be a powerful and trustworthy source.