Drupal at Pfizer
Last week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference they had a general session that included presentations by several large organizations applying Web 2.0 approaches to internal team social publishing. One of these was given by Simon Revell of Pfizer.
With over 100,000 employees, most of whom are knowledge workers working with intellectual property, you can imagine the enterprise 2.0 value creation opportunity at Pfizer. Helping people collaborate, publish and consume knowledge, and establish connections can pay significant dividends for a company like this. To help themselves isolate the needs of their users, Simon and his team created persona narratives.
While Simon was presenting one of the personas named "Jessica", I confess that I was multi-tasking on my email a little. But Bryan House was sitting a couple of rows in front of me and was paying full attention. All of a sudden, he leaned back and said, "Pssst. Jeff! Check it out!". So I looked up to see that Simon was showing a screen shot of a Drupal blog with the Garland theme as part of the persona. You can see the slide on slide 8 of the presentation embedded below:
I caught up with Simon briefly after his presentation and he confirmed that Pfizer is in fact using Drupal for internal blogging. He also mentioned that they are primarily a Sharepoint shop, however, and that it is uncertain how they'll keep using Drupal in the future.
On the positive side, it was wonderful to have Drupal shown on stage at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. It was a wonderful surprise, and a great illustration of the way that Drupal adoption happens in a viral fashion. On the negative side, you had to already know about Drupal to spot it since Simon didn't mention it by name. And we at Acquia didn't know about this in advance or we could have done something to increase the visibility. We need to gather more intelligence on Drupal adoption behind the firewall and raise the profile.
I continue to believe that Enterprise 2.0 is a dormant opportunity for Drupal. It seems to be just off the radar screen for most Drupal solution providers and customers, most of whom seem to use Drupal more often for external facing sites. But the building blocks are there, and I would like to see us do more in this area over time. Why let Sharepoint have all the fun?
It's great indeed. Pfizer
It's great indeed. Pfizer has been using Drupal for a while. I believe the folks at WorkHabit built the site for them about 2 years ago.
I continue to believe that
I continue to believe that Enterprise 2.0 is a dormant opportunity for Drupal. It seems to be just off the radar screen for most Drupal solution providers and customers, most of whom seem to use Drupal more often for external facing sites. But the building blocks are there, and I would like to see us do more in this area over time. Why let Sharepoint have all the fun?
Be careful now.. it sounds like you are picking up on my argument that you trashed a few months ago... :)
In a former life, I was an
In a former life, I was an open source evangelist within Pfizer Global R&D. My managers somewhat begrudgingly supported my affinity for PHP, Perl and MySQL. Although this technology went against the culture of big, expensive and difficult-to-implement, my clients were certainly happy; they got extensible solutions that were damn cheap to implement and support.
There was a certain "maverick" element in Corporate IT that provided me with the infrastructure I needed to roll out Drupal in 2004. Despite some gnashing of teeth, Drupal eventually became a tolerated (though not necessarily "blessed") platform within Pfizer. I personally launched internal Drupal-based sites for many groups within R&D and worked on projects that brought Drupal to Corporate.
Even the new CEO had a Drupal-based "blog" for a time.
Pfizer maverick IT element
Pfizer maverick IT element checking in...
Joe Yaker (above) had me host Drupal to support his work with departmental web sites. Somewhere along the line I was asked if I knew of anyone that could put up a blog site. Well, duh.
I put up about 100 internal Drupal blog sites during 2005-2007; about 20% still have traffic in the range of 100-1000 unique visitors/month. As Simon mentioned, Pfizer is pretty much focused on Sharepoint, so the future is uncertain.
Dries' Workhabit (fine folks, all) comment above refered to a project where I put together a custom site as a moderated/real-time web chat capable of handling 100K concurrent users. My customer wanted some warm fuzzies from an outside expert's casting of an eye upon what we had done to support the high volume requirement.
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