OpenBand

Drupal is a collaboration framework. It started as a simple system for managing conversations and files between friends in school, and has maintained that spirit through its many evolutions. But, as most things do, Drupal reached an age of maturity—it was time for the CMS to graduate and expand.

It feels sometimes like there are two internets—the social and explorative net, and the vast oceans of the business realm. Slowly, these two spheres of experience have blurred, providing exciting new tools to get work done. And as the business sector has embraced the social and media Web, so to have technologies like Drupal become more attractive as enterprise-level collaboration tools.

There is an insatiable demand for collaboration solutions in the social sphere, and many skilled, qualified development shops to help meet that demand. Here at Openband, we decided to start by looking at a different set of demands. It was a clientele in need of evolving with the new capabilities of the collaborative Web and an area with no clear direction in the migration to this brave new world (we like a challenge). We have thus established ourselves as a leader in developing enterprise-level solutions to large organization collaborative needs. We’ve built environments for organizations (some of them very large organizations), providing file management, in-site email clients, “social” networks, rich-data integration, multisite federated identity, and multi-user, real-time translating instant messaging. All on open, evolving, extensible platforms. Much of the features we deploy didn’t exist before we created them, and some of what did exist didn’t work before we fixed it.

Ben Lavender, Chris Johnson and Dan Karran will discuss on Thursday what we’ve done to help establish Drupal as an enterprise platform and the vital functionality we’ve contributed back to the community as a result. They’ll further explore the challenges/limitations Drupal presents to building for an enterprise and future challenges we hope to confront and solve.