Dries Buytaert

Enterprise social communities and Drupal

Jay just posted a blog post, called Building enterprise social communities with Drupal, sharing a white paper that we have written at Acquia. In this white paper, we answer questions like: what kind of social features Drupal supplies, why Drupal is the best choice for building a social site, what Drupal modules are useful when building a social site, and some examples of successful enterprise Drupal communities.

The reason we wrote this white paper is simple: many of the enterprise organizations that we talk to ask us these questions over and over again. Building social business sites is a very hot topic in the enterprise. The work environment in these organizations is evolving, and increasingly more, people want to connect, create, share and find people and information relevant to their work. Needless to say, not all social business sites are equal -- some are team collaboration sites, some are community sites, and others might be networking sites. They can exist behind the firewall for internal teams, or they can be external facing sites to engage with partners and customers.

We wrote this white paper because we wanted to demonstrate that Drupal provides a great platform to build these kind of social sites for the enterprise. If you are interested in building a social site for your enterprise and don't know where to start, have a look at our white paper. Also, if you've built, or have a Drupal site around which you have built a successful community, we'd love to learn about it, and learn from it.

Fujifilm using Drupal

The Japanese Fujifilm, with more than 75,000 employees the world's largest photographic and imaging company, is using Drupal for a community site at http://www.myfinepix.com. It is a website where FinePix camera owners come together to share images, knowledge and inspiration. The site features galleries, forums, photoblogs, news, competitions, user profiles and much more. A good showcase for some of Drupal's social media features.

On Microsoft's anti-Drupal ad

Yesterday, an anti-Drupal ad by Microsoft was spotted in the wild; see the image on the right. The news spread on Twitter like wildfire. I said this was "interesting", not because Microsoft isn't allowed to compete with Drupal but because Microsoft is also promoting Drupal. In fact, I was flattered by the idea that Microsoft considered Drupal worthy of competition. However, it left many of us confused about the fact that Microsoft decided to both partner with Drupal and compete against it.

For me, the interesting part is not whether Microsoft is allowed to compete or not -- of course they are allowed to compete. What is interesting to me is the way Microsoft reacted. Within hours, Microsoft had noticed the small Twitter-tsunami, picked up the phone to talk about it, pulled down the ad and publicly apologized for confusing the Drupal community.

This means a lot. It is hard proof that social media like Twitter works, and that Microsoft can be great at listening and responding. It is proof that the web has changed to be more humanized, and that Microsoft understands how to build relationships online. By being transparent and human, and by publicly apologizing, they built some trust with the Drupal community (as reflected in the comments of Mark Brown's blog post), and that might actually influence people's experience with Microsoft. Plus it looks like, at least for now, Microsoft decided to promote Drupal rather than compete with it.

At the end of the day, this was the act of one Microsoft employee in India who was out of sync with the rest of Microsoft. This inevitably happens in big companies. All is good now.