On 26-Feb-06, at 5:54 PM, Simon Croome wrote:
pat@linuxcolumbus.com wrote:
The only thing Drupal lacks for enterprise acceptance is a marketing team and a price tag. Yes, marketing directed at enterprises would help, if its more enterprise users that Drupal wants. (IMHO, most won't contribute back to the community, Drupal service providers excepted).
Well...these enterprise users actually usually contribute indirectly, through one of two methods: 1. They work with Drupal consultants who get paid to modify/module/ whatever and themselves work contributing into their support/pricing structure 2. They commit to Drupal as a platform and get the most value from integrating/contributing directly There is a longer discussion about some of these issues (and educating enterprise on the values of "community ROI") on the consultant's mailing list.
I also work for a large enterprise (multinational investment bank), and when we selected a CMS last year, Drupal didn't make the short list. We ended up with a very expensive system because it offered the following features that either Drupal doesn't do, or maybe not to the level we needed for our (granted industry-specific) requirements.
Yep. There are lots of "high end" features for which Drupal is not necessarily the right choice...some notes on how this might be implemented, merely for interest's sake.
1. True multi-language support. All content and interfaces in multiple languages, with workflow for helping translators.
Work in progress. Having true multi-language support in a CMS that can be run in a shared hosting account would make Drupal truly shine.
2. Content staging and approval workflow.
Staging site with publish-subscribe. Approval puts content into a publish queue that can get pushed to 1 or more live sites.
3. Version control of everything (content, templates, images, etc.). We needed to be able to see what was on our site on a given day.
Education has some similar requirements, but more around archiving. Could be done with a non-Drupal solution -- i.e. SVN.
4. Multiple dev teams with their own dev servers, mastering their own content.
I like publish-subscribe for this. Yes, I need to invest some time/ money into feedback/funding for JVD to do more with this, or for some other people to dive in.
5. Multi-target publishing, with atomic copies and rollback.
Could also be pub-sub, and the rollback feature could potentially be added.
6. LDAP authentication and roles-based authorisation, or integration with a product like Netegrity.
LDAP "works today", although configuring it is non-trivial.
What we got in the end was basically a pimped up rcs/rsync (except for the price tag of course!)
I really like Drupal, and am quite happy that it doesn't have all of these features. I don't think they would apply to the majority of users.
Yep. All about picking the right tools for the job. -- Boris Mann Vancouver 778-896-2747 San Francisco 415-367-3595 SKYPE borismann http://www.bryght.com