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.
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Bryan House
It is that phase of my life! I'm just turning 30 in a month, working with Drupal for 7 years and just had my third Acquia anniversary a week ago. Time to look back and evaluate how things went, all the good and bad things; even better if the wisdom can be shared with others. This was part of my thinking when I submitted the session titled "Come for the software, stay for the community" for Drupalcon Copenhagen.
Gábor Hojtsy
It sounded like a really simple request: "Is it easy to add a search filter for 'My posts'?". In other words, add a search result facet for posts by the current (logged in) user through the Apache Solr Search Integration module APIs?
But then the wheels start turning - we want not just one blind link, but a real facet link that tells us how many results we'll get. Also, if we are filtering by 'My posts' then we probably have an equal use case for the opposite filter 'Posts not by me'. So we really need a facet block with two links and facets counts.
Peter Wolanin
Comments
Dries Buytaert
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.