I continually marvel at how much better the open source world works than the old proprietary software software world.

Yesterday I encountered an amazingly good illustration. I was discussing Drupal Commons with a team from a large, household-name enterprise that is planning a social business site. And boy, they had lots of questions! Read full article »

Today is a fun day for me: We’re releasing Drupal Commons as a 1.0 release. Woo hoo! Time - once again - for open source to go blow the doors off another proprietary software cathedral.

Drupal Commons is Acquia’s project to create an open source social business software solution for enterprises deploying a community site - either externally-facing, or for an internal community. Read full article »

At the start of DrupalCon San Francisco, we let folks know that we were working on a new Drupal Distribution called Drupal Commons. As a reminder, Drupal Commons is integrating groups, discussion forums, blogs, wikis, documents, and events into a single packaged solution. It is designed to meet the business needs of enterprises who are looking at solutions like Jive. At the time, I made a screencast to give people a quick look at what it's capabilities are.

Since the time since that initial screencast, we've had a gratifying level of interest in Drupal Commons, and so I thought an update would be useful to share. Read full article »

Lately we've heard from a growing number of enterprises looking to build community sites. These companies are asking:

• Can I build a community site with Drupal?
• How does Drupal compare to other options?
• What modules should I use?
• Are there examples of Drupal being used like this?

If you ask a Drupalist, they will say "Of course, Drupal can do it", and will point to http://groups.drupal.org as proof. But if you're a VP of Marketing or someone working to build a community, that site doesn't make it obvious how you can build community sites for Read full article »

Using Drupal has suddenly become much easier. Acquia has just released into (private) Beta Drupal Gardens. We've been working on Drupal Gardens for over a year, teaming our expert Drupalers with our crack infrastructure / hosting experts, to provide Drupal 7 as a hosted service. We've included tons of usability improvements, and contributed the vast majority of them back to the open source project. Read full article »

In installment one of this Debunking Drupal Myths series, I mentioned that the proprietary software companies who are starting to see Drupal on their competitive screen are worried. They're using the classic FUD technique -- trying to raise Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about Drupal's capabilities. And so I started this series to start to debunk the FUD. Our first case dealt with Content Control. Read full article »

Acquia has quickly become successful in increasing the exposure of Drupal to "CTO-level" conversations at larger enterprises. Despite the fact that there are numerous examples of big companies using it, Drupal is really still pretty unknown in big organizations - at least when you compare it to commercial, closed-source content management systems (the "incumbents").

As Drupal starts to make inroads in these larger organizations, the incumbents are forced to defend why their expensive proprietary software is better than that "little Drupal project." Hooray! The mere fact that they now must have answers shows that Drupal isn't such a little project anymore, and it is starting to cause real pain to the incumbents. It's now only a matter of time: high quality, powerful open source software with a big community behind it is the biggest threat to any closed-source software. The incumbents are living on borrowed time.

But given that we're now impacting them competitively, we're all about to experience an increasing flow of venomous-sounding FUD coming from these incumbents. Read full article »

Dries & I (well, let's just say "Acquia") are doing a little research and we want you guys to be a part of it. We're looking down the road and evaluating a variety of new things to add to our product offerings. We're interested in your feedback because we want to be sure build what you actually want, vs. what we imagine you want.

So help us get it right by taking our little survey. You should be able to complete it in under 5 minutes.

Now as much as we'd like to think you'd do this because you love Dries, Drupal & Acquia, I'm sure more of you will talk to us if we give away some loot. So as a bonus for taking the survey, you can choose to enter our contest where one lucky duck will receive for FREE their choice of either of two award prizes: Read full article »

It is so amazing to have a great, global community of passionate Drupalists. It usually means that you can quickly find people who are of like mind that want to help the Drupal world grow in ways that are new, unique, and useful. Today is no exception: I'm happy to say that Jeff Burns and Acquia have partnered to merge his 3rd World Themes project into Acquia's design-oriented microsite design.acquia.com. Read full article »

This weekend, 150+ people assembled at the MIT Stata Center in Cambridge for the first-ever Design4Drupal Camp. This was unique in that a large majority of the attendees were deeply involved in design - not just coding modules. While some of the usual suspects were there, many designers were meeting each other for the first time. Read full article »