So the Drupal community is talking about Dries‘ new venture, Acquia.

In most posts, the focus is on Dries. But I actually had a chance to talk with Jay Batson about Acquia in Barcelona — after I had met Jay at DrupalCON Sunnyvale. Jay is a very smart guy, and he’s been researching Drupal and the community for quite some time.

I understand the vision behind the company and agree that it is a Good Thing^TM for the maturity of Drupal as a platform.

When I started in Drupal, I was typically the only “enterprise” representative in the room — Bryght and CivicCRM excepted. At DrupalCON Vancouver, the projects we were planning were some of the largest ever done. Now, not that much later, enterprise-worthy Drupal installations are commonplace.

The formation of Acquia is, as I said, an indication of the maturity level of the platform. And make no mistake, Drupal is a platform, not just a CMS.

So here’s to exciting times.

Arrived in Boston this afternoon. Easy flight. A quick trip down to Faneuil Hall for some chowda and then back to the hotel to meetup with a few Boston Drupalers.

Thanks to Chris, Lee, and Ajay — good people — I got to talk Drupal and be social over a nice dinner.

Tomorrow: I present to the New York Press Association, “Why you should use an open source content management system.” I wrote the talk on the plane ride here. I think it’s going to work.

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.

I’ve been spending most of my free time these days working on Drupal projects. But I still have a day job. In fact, I routinely turn down Drupal consultancy jobs because I simply don’t have enough time.

Not only do I have a day job; I recently was promoted during a company restructuring. Bob Gilbert (my boss) and I are now the Strategic Partnership Development group at Morris DigitalWorks (MDW). (We are working on hiring one more person right now, too.)

What is Strategic Partnership Development? Well, to me, it’s similar to venture capital, except that it works inside the confines of our existing corporate structure. Our mission, at its core, is to find ways to extend and renew our core business by acquiring, hiring, or partnering with third-party developers.

The impetus for this new team is largely the Yahoo! newspaper consortium (NPC), a complex content and revenue sharing agreement between our parent company, Yahoo!, and over a dozen leading US newspaper companies.

Currently, my time is split between reviewing agreements between MDW and its partners and looking for new technology and business models that will help the newspaper industry.

Look for more details in this space, but first I’m off to my first vacation of the year.

The title is intentionally drastic, of course, but two recent posts make the thought come up. The first is a post from Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal:

I wonder what impact the introduction of SharePoint 2007 will have. What was once an important Drupal differentiator (i.e. bundling a wide variety of functionality into a single platform) will finally become commodity in 2007. Instead, seamless integration with other applications might become essential to compete? Interesting times!

Shockingly, he’s talking about Microsoft adopting some of the features used by FOSS projects.

Especially the introduction of SharePoint 2007 might have significant impact on this particular market. SharePoint 2007 adds features like forums, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, news aggregation, surveys, issue tracking … but also install profiles and custom content types. Clearly, Microsoft decided to play catch up. And rumor has it that the improved integration with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook is jaw-dropping.

Secondly, this post from a frustrated designer about the lack of Drupal developers for hire suggests that Drupal may really hit a wall in 2007.

Demand for Drupal related services is increasing exponentially, as is evident from the increase in inquiries at my website this past year. Unfortunately, it seems the availability of Drupal related services are not increasing to match.

I had one especially hell-ish project this year because I was not able to find a developer to help me with some modifications.

It is entirely possible that I was one of the people who turned that project down. (If so, I used reason #1 from her list: “Unfamiliarity with the module(s) involved.”)

Here’s the issue:

1. More people want the services that the Drupal platform provides.
2. Not all of those people are not technical enough to use the Drupal platform without support.
3. Microsoft (and others) can afford to offer support that makes users more comfortable with their product than with FOSS alternatives. (Notice that I didn’t say ‘better’ before flaming me, please.)

This is how Microsoft won the desktop war: it co-opted popular features and packaged them in a less-threatening way (especially to corporate IT departments). I’d bet that our IT guys would prefer SharePoint to Drupal; except for the fact that we don’t trust IIS servers and won’t put them in our data farm.

I’ll say more as a prediction for 2007.

I haven’t written about newspapers for a long time. (I’ve been stuck in coder mode for almost a year.) But the recent sale of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is big news.

Amidst all the coverage and commentary, I like this small line in Nick Coleman’s rant against his old owners.

[With the sale,] McClatchy leaves Minnesota’s newspapers weakened and in the hands of companies with no local ties.

Coleman’s concern is not just because the Avista Capital Partners owns more oil rigs than newspapers; the lack of local ownsership may be the deciding factor in the death of the traditional newspaper. That’s because local owners share in the fate of their communities. Remote corporate owners do not.

There is a large and cynical part of me that views the recent Yahoo! / Newspaper Consortium deal as the first crash of a host of oncoming waves that will drown the traditional role of the local newspaper. Getting into bed with Yahoo! makes some financial sense (which I can’t go into, since my employer is looking at joining up). But, taken to a logical extreme, it paves the way for the newspaper outlets to become local distribution points for Yahoo! more than it makes Yahoo! a global distribution point for newspapers.

What does that have to do with the sale of the Strib? Well, the devaluation indicated by the almost $700M dollar reduction in price in the 8 years since McClatchy bought the paper. Writing for the AP, Jonathan Freed reports:

McClatchy sold its largest newspaper in part because it can take a tax loss, and because the newspaper’s growth had tapered off, said Chairman and CEO Gary Pruitt.

Newspapers, in large part, succeed based on their relationships to the people they cover and the communities they serve. Part of the decline of newspapers is the disconnection that many Americans (myself included) feel for the places they live (the oft-cited Bowling Alone phenomenon. Distant ownership makes the disconnect bi-directional: now the owners have no roots in the community either.

If the readers think that, then they are likely not to trust the ‘local’ newspaper to look after local interests. At Morris (and I’m writing from corporate HQ), we get complaints like that frequently.

And the news business — even the new online news business — is really built on reader trust.

Our newest site build on Drupal’s feed aggregation tools. This one is all gossip, all the time. Not normally what I’d like to think I read, but the site is addictive.

A big shout to Nik the designer. Thanks to Drupal, we cranked this out in 10 days.

http://rubybaboon.com

This was a change to break away from ‘newspaper’ web site and try something totally different.

Drupal modules (shout outs):

- aggregator2
- aggregator2_autotaxonomy (patched for 4.7 http://drupal.org/node/62794)
- flickr
- logintoboggan
- lovehate
- lovehate_vote (a block extension http://drupal.org/node/74123)
- servicelinks
- tagadelic
- userpoints (added vote_up_down and lovehate support)
- vote_up_down

We’re at t-minus 3 days before SavannahNow, the web arm of the Savannah Morning News goes full-on beta. Sinice today is a Sunday, I have some time to reflect and review. This first review will be concept. The next technical.

Breaking the Newspaper Habit

The single biggest thing on this project, for me, is breaking out of the hey-lets-shovel-today’s-newspaper-content-to-the-web publishing model. Why? Because that dicision cascades down into all areas of the site. Without that anchor, the certainty of content and mission that comes from knowing that the task is to reproduce print online, the whole project of an “online newspaper” becomes an open question.

[Sidebar: Yes, for various reasons, an automated version of Bluffton, if you enter into this enterprise honestly, you can engage the audience in a collaborative process, building loyalty, trust, and readership at the same time.

The question for us right now is if that trust will scale. Bluffton is a small community of <20,000. Savannah is 500,000+.

One way to mitigate the risk of scale is to divide the audience into geographic segments. An ambitious project that involves newsroom, ad sales, and user tagging of content, we hope to let people who live in, say, the Islands area can find information and personalities near them.

Personalities

That word is another good jumping-off point. The problem with almost all newspaper web sites is that they have no personality. (I would say that this is a problem with most newspapers in print as well, where the only sense of personality is perhaps that on the editorial page, if you’re lucky.) Part of this is the journalist’s ‘objective’ nature. A bigger part of it is an attempt to cast the biggest net for the widest audience and therefore an unwillingness to risk offending.

Not that we’re going to try to offend anyone, but when you move away from the broadcast model of publishing, you open the door to a multitude of voices — some of whom won’t say what you want to hear, or how you want to hear it.

The burden for controlling that (if control is possible) will lie with the people who use the site.

But back to personality. The best part of the site is the ability to skate from person to topic to person. I love this part. here are some of the things you might do (a user-case that came out of development):

1. Go to the site to read an article you heard about (typical behavior)
2. Click on the author’s name to find out more about her
3. See other stories and blog posts by that author
4. Read a blog post about a topic you didn’t know the author covered
5. Click from there to a category page that interests you (cause the blogs have free-tagging)
6. Find a group has formed around that topic
7. Click through to the group and read what they’re up to
8. Join the group
9. Post an event for the group to get together
10. Blog about the event after the fact (or even during)

These kinds of interactive chains are made possible by the open publishing model we’ve adopted. And there are an infinite variety of such chains available. (I’ll talk some more about one of these under the tech notes.)

In many ways, personalities (yours especially) drive the site. I find myself spedning time each day moving from profile to profile, reading about people and their lives.

Risks

Certainly there are risks involved in such an approach. And I’m sure we’ll run into most of them. But now is the time to say that I’m proud to be part of a team that will at least take those risks.

Big thanks to Darryl, Julian, Michael, Heather and Felicia for making sure this thing sees the light of day.

The potential, in the end, outweighs the risks, if you ask me.

The neverending project is close to ending…

Public beta test now ongoing.

I just sent this off to the Drupal developer’s list. It’s worth keeping here, too.
—

Just some thoughts based on the discussion so far, from the perpective of a large enterprise that is evaluating our future use of Drupal. For perspective, we run about 10 million page views per month across 30+ sites.

- 4,6 v. 4.7. We use what is appropriate at the time our projects start, with an eye towards maintaining an upgraded path. In one case, that means we’re running a security patched 4.5. In another, 4.6.5 (which is our current standard). While I was at OSCMS, I heard good, passionate reasons for upgrading to 4.7, but I can’t justify it for two reasons: 1) It’s still in ‘beta’ and I don’t have the resources to help move it out of beta (more on that below); 2) We ‘froze’ our selection of contributed modules on November 15, 2005 for this project. The module compatibility issue would be largge if we moved to 4.7.

- Drupal already _is_ ready for enterprise use: it just depends on your enterprise. Bryght, OurMedia, and NowPublic all come to mind as ‘enterprise’ Drupal companies. The issue (at least in my experience) is that those three are all ‘new’ ventures that used Drupal as the basline of their IT infrastructure. Integrating Drupal into an existing IT structure (including all the ‘policies and procedures’ that you currently have in place) can be quite daunting.

- Commit to Drupal or not? This depends on the fundamental question: “How much time does Drupal save you versus 1) creating your own CMS; 2) using some other OSS or commercial CMS? This one, I think is a no-brainer, with one caveat, which is:

- Commit to Drupal.org. After spending the week in Vancouver, I made the following report to our management team. If we are to go forward using Drupal, we need a dedicated support-and-development team of 3 people. (And my eyeball prediictions of such things are ususally pretty accurate.) The team lead will have, as one of his/her main responsibilities, the task of being our public face within the Drupal community. This includes going to events, encouraging contributions of code, and helping with documentation. This is crucial, because without being a valued member of the community, all you’ll ever really have is your own Drupal fork to support. If your organization goes forward with the idea of contributing patches to core, helping document Drupal, and so forth, then you will have a voice in future Drupal development.

/climbs off soapbox.