Dries Buytaert

Acquia product strategy and vision

In my Acquia 2010 retrospective, I promised to write a bit more about Acquia's product strategy. This blog post provides a high level view of the vision that we've been working towards for the last 3 years, and explains how Acquia can help simplify your web strategy.

The web: it's currently a mess

Ten years ago, the average organization had one website. Since then, doing business through the web has become more complex and have introduced a diverse set of needs. If you're like most organizations the number of sites you have is large and continues to grow at a rapid clip.

For most organizations, one tool could not historically get the job done, so they kept multiple tools in their toolbox – whether they intended to or not. The situation can be quite a mess, and is unfortunately a common scenario in many enterprises.

Each site has unique needs

Most of these sites are vastly different in terms of scale, functionality, complexity and longevity. Some sites are under continuous development while other sites are only around for a couple of weeks or months. Some of the websites are owned by the company's IT department and hosted internally, while other websites may be owned by their marketing department and hosted externally. As a result, the level of investment and the time to market requirements are usually very different.

Standardize on Drupal to save costs

CIOs – facing cost-cutting pressures and the need to streamline their resources – are now addressing the reality of running twenty different content management systems on twenty different stack configurations as an expensive, unnecessary burden for the organization. They have always known that there were cost savings to be made if they standardize on a single platform, but have never felt the confidence in a single platform to suit all of their needs across their organization.

Drupal has the required features to accomplish this today. This is more than a vision – it is reality. Every day, more organizations are standardizing on Drupal.

By standardizing on Drupal, organizations can reduce training costs, reduce maintenance costs, streamline security, and optimize internal resources – all without sacrificing quality or requirements. Standardizing on Drupal certainly doesn't mean every single system needs to be Drupal. Even going from 20 different systems to 10 or to 5 different systems still translates to dramatic cost savings. It goes without saying that you need to be smart about what makes sense to standardize on Drupal, and what not to standardize on Drupal. With our vast community of contributors, Drupal continues to become better and better and the feasibility for an organization to standardize on Drupal continues to improve over time.

Drupal distributions help adoption

Drupal distributions are an important part of helping organizations adopt Drupal. Drupal distributions are complete, ready-to-use solutions built on Drupal. Just install and go.

Drupal Commons is a Drupal distribution for social business software; it provides organizations a complete solution for forming collaborative communities. Similarly, Open Publish is a Drupal distribution optimized for news publishing. Acquia sees expansion of distributions as critically important to the future growth of Drupal. With that, we are acting as a software publishers for these and other distributions developed by partners within the Drupal community; supporting the marketing, promotion, support, and ongoing development of distributions to extend the capability of the companies who have incubated these incredible products.

Add the Acquia Network for support and cloud services

To help organizations adopt and standardize on Drupal, we created the Acquia Network to provide a suite of Drupal support, knowledge, and web development and maintenance tools to help build, manage and extend Drupal websites.

The Acquia Network is your connection to a team of Drupal experts, available 24x7, and backed by Acquia's engineering and professional services team. As an Acquia Network subscriber, you can submit help tickets, search our knowledge base and contribute in our subscriber forums.

The Acquia Network also provides you access to a number of cloud-based services. Services like heartbeat monitoring, software update management, and soon to be released integration with New Relic provide visibility into your site's performance and help with site management. Other services, like Acquia Search and Mollom, extend the functional capabilities of your sites.

We are in the middle of a massive redesign of the Acquia Network and many of the services you use through the Acquia Network today (including the Acquia Library, a broad collection of tips, tricks, how-to's, and resources for Drupal developers and site owners). Through the Acquia Network you will soon have the ability to easily access a growing list of third-party services, with many available at no additional charge. We already offer many third-party services (e.g. Mollom for spam filtering, New Relic for application profiling, etc), but we'll soon be opening up the Acquia Network as a ‘service delivery platform' and marketplace for additional services. In the works for release over the next few months are mobile design tools from Mobify, analytics, video services, marketing tools, and more.

Interested in adding your service to the Acquia Network? In the future, we will roll out APIs and infrastructure (e.g. billing) to enable other organizations to deliver their cloud-services to any Drupal site through the Acquia Network.

Add Acquia Hosting, a Drupal Platform-as-a-Service

For large websites that require custom code, high availability, on-demand elasticity or release management tools (i.e. staging and production workflows), we recommend Acquia Hosting, our Drupal-platform-as-a-service (Drupal PaaS).

Acquia Hosting is an extension of the Acquia Network, so if you need help scaling your site or debugging a problem, Acquia Client Advisors are always available to help. Through the Acquia Network, we also provide a number of Acquia Hosting specific e-services, including backups, database rollbacks, staging environments, version control for code management, and more.

Going forward you can expect even more developer tools and self-service tools to be added to Acquia Hosting, as well as more critical features for large scale sites, including improved security and code workflow options.

Add Drupal Gardens for rapid micro-site development

All sites are different. Not all your organization's website need the scale, functionality, complexity or longevity of your most important websites. A lot of times you have smaller sites that you may want to roll-out quickly, preferably without having to involve IT.

For that, we built Drupal Gardens, a Drupal-as-a-service platform that makes building Drupal websites as simple as point and click. Built on Drupal 7, Drupal Gardens brings the freedom and innovation you expect from open source without having to worry about installing, hosting or upgrading your Drupal site.

Our mission for Drupal Gardens is to allow site builders to go from design to online in minutes instead of days or weeks. To help, we provide an ever-growing library of site templates and themes to start from. We believe it will be the best platform for your smaller sites that complement your primary web properties.

For organizations that need to manage tens, if not hundreds, of small websites, we're building ‘Enterprise Drupal Gardens'. It provides site provisioning, site management, single sign-on, multi-site dashboards and organization wide templates and themes to maintain consistent branding.

Host your own sites, if you prefer

One of the biggest advantages of using Open Source software is that there are no limits to how you use the software. Some organizations prefer to host some of their own sites. The Acquia Network is able to plug in into your site, regardless of where it is hosted.

No lock in with "Open SaaS"

Almost all Software as a Service (SaaS) providers employ a proprietary model – they might allow you to export your data, but they usually don't allow you to export the underlying code. Users of Drupal Gardens are able to export their Drupal Gardens site – the code, the theme and data – and move of the platform to any Drupal hosting environment. By doing so, we provide people an easy on-ramp but we allow them to grow beyond the capabilities of Drupal Gardens without locking them in.

We call this "Open SaaS" or Software as a Service done right based on Open Source principles – it offers a much more secure and low-cost alternative to proprietary counterparts.

Conclusions

I've highlighted some of our key products and services in this blog post and will bring you a more detailed white paper focusing on Acquia's vision. Stay tuned!

An improved Webform user interface for Drupal

At Acquia, we spent a lot of time improving the Webform module, one of the top 10 most popular Drupal modules, as well as the Form Builder module, a companion module that provides an improved user interface for the Webform module. The Webform module and the Form Builder module allow people to create custom forms such as contact forms, online surveys and more.

Both modules are maintained by Nate 'quicksketch' Haug, one of the top Drupal contributors. Like anything Nate does, the modules are amazingly powerful and have great code quality. We wanted to add support for creating custom forms to Drupal Gardens and believed that the Webform and Form Builder modules were the right way to go. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Before making Webform and Form Builder available as part of Drupal Gardens, we wanted to try and see if we could make Webforms easier to use, without making it less powerful. We spent about 200 hours to explore various different design and interaction models. We used both paper prototypes and working prototypes to conduct usability tests, and used these to drive further optimizations. After we felt good about the direction, we ran it by quicksketch. With quicksketch's guidance, we helped upgrade both modules from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, and implemented the new user interface on top of that. The new drag-and-drop interface puts some things in different locations on the page and has a number of different interaction patterns compared to the old user interface. To do so, we wrote a couple of modules that add our user interface on top of the Webform and Form Builder modules. It is layered like a stack: Webform → Form Builder → Alternate UI.

Fast forward 25 person-weeks, and we've now rolled out our improved user interface as part of the latest Drupal Gardens release. To see how it looks, take a look at the video below or create a free Drupal Gardens website if you prefer.

We're contributing everything back to the community -- some things we've already contributed back, other things we're in the process to. We're also helping to back port some changes to Drupal 6, even though we don't need them for Drupal Gardens. With these contributions, everyone in the community can benefit.

The new user interface is an incredible achievement that a lot of people deserve recognition for, including quicksketch who spent many years of getting Webform and Form Builder modules to where we were able to use them as a starting point.

I'm pretty excited about this user interface, and would love your feedback and suggestions. What do you think?

Update on January 10th, 2011: the Webform Alternate UI module is now available on drupal.org. This module provides an alternate user interface for the Webform module, allowing you to create and edit forms from within an easy-to-use form building tool.

Teach.gov using Drupal

The U.S. Department of Education just launched a new micro-site built on Drupal: teach.gov. At teach.gov you can learn what it's like to be a teacher and get the tools you need to launch your own career in education.

The site looks surprisingly crisp and modern for a government site, don't you think?

These kinds of micro-sites make a lot of sense. Visitors that are looking for particular information want instant gratification. It is much better to create a micro-site for this than to embed the same content two levels deep in ed.gov (also a Drupal site). No need to get bogged down with ed.gov's navigation, visual design or mix of target audiences.

While building highly targeted and compelling micro-sites makes a lot of sense, they can be expensive and time-consuming to build and maintain. That is exactly why I think Drupal Gardens will catch on -- it makes building micro-sites fast, cheap and hassle free. We're still boostrapping Drupal Gardens but I really think we're onto something. Why? Because it makes a lot sense. :)

20,000 Drupal Gardens sites

We hit another milestone today: twenty-thousand sites have been created with Drupal Gardens. It was only two months ago that we hit the 10,000 sites milestone. Who would have thought that we would have doubled that number so quickly? This is really a gratifying moment for us. It means that we’re on the right track, building a product that people value highly.

There has also been an increased interest by enterprise customers in Drupal Gardens. It seems to be filling a need for large organizations, as well as creative agencies that want to build and consistently manage many micro-sites, or that want to build them quickly. If you fit that description, I encourage you to take Drupal Gardens for a spin and to share your feedback with us. We continue to roll out enhancements to Drupal Gardens every three weeks, so your feedback is very important as it influences directly our plans.

I’m proud to have reached this milestone, and would like to thank to all of the Drupal Gardens site owners who have made this possible. While 20,000 sites might sound like a lot, we’re just getting started!

Drupal Gardens now in open beta

Today we’ve reached another important milestone at Acquia: Drupal Gardens is now in open beta. No more beta codes. No more waiting to try the service. Now anyone can access Drupal Gardens and create a free Drupal 7 site!

It’s been fun to watch Drupal Gardens grow and mature during the private beta. In addition to building out the feature set, we’ve spent a great deal of time improving the stability and underlying performance of the service. And we’ve had a wild ride on Drupal 7 HEAD along the way, as Jacob Singh describes so colorfully:

Running from an Alpha versus HEAD is like the difference between playing Jenga on a sleeping elephant to playing Jenga on a cocaine addled elephant riding a skateboard being jabbed in the [rear] with a hot poker.

We’ve also invested plenty of time with Drupal Gardens users - gathering feedback, performing user tests, discussing potential features. One request that was added in the latest release is site duplication. This is the ability to clone an existing site, including its design, functionality, information architecture and content, to create a new site. It’s one of the first Enterprise Drupal Gardens features, enabling site builders and designers to do rapid prototyping in Drupal Gardens and roll out new sites quickly according to pre-defined templates. Site duplication will evolve into site and theme marketplaces where anyone can share site templates for use by others.

Drupal Gardens continues to advance with great strides. I encourage you to take Drupal Gardens for a test drive and to share your feedback with us.

Mollom protecting Drupal Gardens against spam

Acquia recently wrapped up its latest internal development sprint. One new development that was announced is the fact that Drupal Gardens is now protected by Mollom's spam protection services.

What does this mean for Drupal Gardens users? Just what you'd think. You receive the best spam protection available on the web from Mollom. There is no setup, no hassle, and no cost.

What does this mean for developers? A great example of how to provide Mollom to your customers, in the form of the Mollom API module for Drupal. The Mollom API module was developed by Jacob Singh and Gábor Hojtsy from Acquia. The Mollom API module uses Mollom's Reseller API to automatically provision the service and to programmatically obtain public and private keys for each Drupal Gardens site.

Clickability FUD on Open Source versus SaaS

Clickability, a proprietary SaaS platform for content management, has compared SaaS to Open Source. Not only is the comparison inaccurate, it omits the downsides of SaaS and frankly, they are comparing apples to oranges. Open Source is a licensing and development model, SaaS is a software delivery model. Either they are distorting things on purpose, or they don't understand Open Source at all. In other words, time to look at some good ol' FUD and to share my take on Open Source versus SaaS.

To give you a sample of their comparison, take Clickability's take on integration:

One of the biggest advantages of using Open Source software is that there are no limits on what services you are "allowed" to integrate it with. Given the number of sites that Drupal powers and the size and strength of the Drupal project, official integrations with other software and service vendors are abundant for Drupal. If you need integration, for example, with a highly specialized, niche product or web service, it may already exist among the 6,000 contributed modules for Drupal. If it doesn't, you are free to create it yourself. The same is true for other Open Source projects. Good luck getting that into the development cycle of a proprietary SaaS platform.

In many ways, Open Source is actually less risky than putting all your eggs in a single proprietary-software-basket. If you are unhappy with a particular Open Source company or service, you can take all the code and go to the next company.

Or take their section on hosting and performance:

I won't even begin to debunk what they write on self-hosting -- it doesn't have anything to do with being Open Source. Suffice to say that the great thing about FUD is that it validates our work in the Open Source community. They wouldn't have such a comparison page if they weren't worried about Open Source disrupting or slowing down their business.

My take on Open Source versus SaaS?

It is true that SaaS enables organizations to save money on hardware, configuration efforts and avoid hosting and maintenance hassles. However, proprietary SaaS vendors like Clickability need to ask themselves what happens when we start building SaaS solutions based on Open Source values. Open Source SaaS offerings, like Acquia's Drupal Gardens offer the convenience and support of SaaS multiplied by the benefits of Open Source.