[support] Drupal for University use

[John Callahan]

The University I work for is looking at various CMS solutions for 
several web needs, such as their primary websites, for 
colleges/department/research centers, for social networks, for student 
organizations, maybe even for individual student web sites.  The idea is 
for the central IT group to host our primary sites and sites for smaller 
groups without IT experience... and to support others on campus who want 
to run their own servers/sites/databases.   I have put together a few 
smaller Drupal 5 sites and have enjoyed my experience so far.  So, I 
making a presentation to our Web CMS committee this Friday.   (I believe 
they're also looking at Joomla, Plone, and a few commercial options; and 
we are testing Sakai for course management.)


I'm putting together the basics (basic architecture and IT requirements, 
pros and cons of Drupal, list of major Drupal web sites particularly 
academic sites) but I'd like to know if anyone else has done the same. 
What kind of feedback did you get?   Are there are pertinent points not 
obvious to the beginning Drupal user (such as myself) that may be worth 
mentioning? 


Scalability is also an issue.  I don't know the traffic statistics but 
there will be a wide range of applications and volume; from our basic 
informational pages to social networks run by faculty/staff to small 
research groups.   I've read on a few sites that Drupal does not scale 
well to high traffic sites, such as 15M+ hits/month or so.  However, 
those references are a bit out-dated and I know The Onion, MTV UK, and 
others receive much higher traffic than we would.


Any advice would be appreciated.  Thanks!

- John