[support] Help with implementing drupal for a large organization

[Tina Callahan]

I'm looking for any assistance, suggestions or contact information that 
might help me direct the implementation of Drupal as a University-wide 
web solution. Please read below to see more details about what I'm 
looking for. Any information would be greatly appreciated.

_*About Us*_
The University of Delaware (UD), located in Newark, Delaware, is now 
committed to rolling out Drupal as the primary web solution for the 
entire University. We currently have 7 colleges, 50 research centers, 23 
intercollegiate athletic programs, numerous student organizations, and a 
long list of units that currently manage their current static html sites.

_*The Plan*_
We plan to offer drupal-based web hosting to any and all units, 
colleges, and organizations within the University community. Let's just 
say that we expect to run drupal as a multiple "multi-site" installs and 
are expecting 100+ sites.

At this point the plan is to run a production box with a mirrored 
development box for site modifications. We are building the servers on 
the UNIX environment using Drupal 6.

We need help in best practices for our user community.  More explicitly:

    * We expect to set up a standard drupal install and add UD "vetted"
      modules. As new modules or updates become available, we expect
      that we will need to add these to the "core" set of modules that
      we will make available to all sites. (ie. sites/all/modules
      folder) Any suggestions on how to update modules and theme for a
      large number of sites?
    * To start with, we see three drupal core installs: the first for
      low-profile or non-aggressive site development, the second for
      moderate development, and the third for aggressive development.
      The thought behind this is to reduce the number of sites that we
      need to review for conflicts with newly added or modified modules.
      Any thoughts on this?
    * We are trying to develop a policy on user access to the file
      system. We understand that there are users that won't want access,
      but there will also be others that want to tweak modules and
      themeing directories. Are there any suggestions on best practices
      for allowing our users access to the files system? My systems
      folks do not want to have the nightmare of granting access, but as
      a developer myself, I think this is a must.
    * URL domains are also an issue. We have some sites that are
      subdomains (mysite.udel.edu), other sites are directory-based
      sites under the hosted domain (udel.edu/mysite). Udel.edu is
      running on another server. I feel confident that we can run the
      subdomains without much a problem, however, I am interested to see
      if there is a suggestion on what to do with the latter issue of
      udel.edu/mysite. I don't want to rewrite the URL or redirect. Any
      thoughts or comments on this?

Please note, I recently joined the Drupal in Ed group and plan to submit 
these questions more explicitly to them. I am also aware of the case 
studies on http://groups.drupal.org/taxonomy/term/4339. Sorry for the 
length of the message, please contact me if you have questions, 
comments, or suggestions.

Thanks!
-Tina

**********************************
Tina Callahan
014 Smith Hall, Newark, DE 19716
University of Delaware
302-831-1982
tina.callahan at udel.edu
**********************************

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