Josh Koenig of Chapter Three is starting a series about Drupal and the Enterprise and mentions the “Is Drupal an Enterprise Solution?” panel from OSCMS Sunnyvale.

His post merges nicely with some things I’m doing right now (and reminded me of this old post).

In my new job, one of my tasks is contract management. That means I need to know where each vendor and customer contract is in our bureaucracy. It’s tedious but necessary.

To keep up, I built out a Drupal 5 intranet site. Decked out with CCK and Views, I was able to put together a simple tracking system that gives my bosses a quick overview of the contract status for all our various dealings.

I’m also using the Node Access module to keep company secrets (mostly contracts that include non-disclosure language) from being seen by all employees. We’re using private file downloads to keep digital files out of the wrong hands, too.

Ironically, I’ve been working with Drupal for almost 3 years, and this site is the first Drupal site (aside from my development test site) that I actually manage. Usually, I just write some code or give some advice and others do the day-to-day work. But this time, I approve all the content, manage accounts, and (importantly) set access rules.

Now, a funny thing has happened. Every person who gets a tour of the site really likes it. Or they say: This would be great for me if it had this change. Sometimes, in CCK, I make the change in front of them. I had a meeting on Friday with the head of procurement, who is now testing the site for his needs. (And his department does purchasing for 60+ different business operations.)

The enterprise moral to the story? My competition in this space isn’t Joomla, it’s our SAP installation. We use SAP for most financial tracking, but it is too big and unwieldy for something like contract tracking. The fact that I can alter the site quickly and in direct response to user feedback makes this site incredibly powerful.

There is a potentially huge market for this type of Drupal work. Historically, you’d hire a programmer (or a team) to develop a custom application (my brother-in-law makes a good living doing custom accounting systems). Or, you’d hire a monolithic application provider like SAP to install cumbersome software that either does half or what you need or does three times more than you can comprehend.

With Drupal, I’ve been able to find just the right balance. And now if we hook the user auth system into our Exchange server, we may take this site company-wide, so that managers throughout our company can use a single system for contract tracking.