Deliver digital faster with Drupal Part 1Act, react, and execute
faster w ith Drupal. Your time-to-market can be the difference betw
een success andfailure in todays rapidly changing and evolving
business w orld; you dont know w hat tomorrow s killer app
orinnovation w ill be, but you need to be free to embrace it. How
fast can you build and provision digital properties toleapfrog
ahead of your competition? What happens w hen the market changes
and shifts around you yet again orconstantly? A modular, open
source solution w ith an active professional community like Drupal
lets you re-use,re-arrange, and re-assemble components and
solutions, increasing your production speed and eff iciency w
heninnovation strikes.
Drupal helps you winAs business itself becomes digital, the
benefits that a w idely adopted, open source technology solution
like Drupalcan bring to organisations today are manyfold. This post
focuses on how Drupal helps you deliver digital faster. ReadWhy
Drupal? Because it helps you w in for more background on the series
it belongs to. Why Drupal? First principlesw ill get you up to
speed on my w orking definitions of success in business today, open
source and the Four Freedomsthat define it, and Drupal itself: open
source at scale.
Ready, set, head start!The moment you dow nload Drupal and
plug-in modules from Drupal.org, you have millions of hours of
coding by tensof thousands of developers at your f ingertips. That
code is the distilled best practices of more than a decade ofDrupal
professionals w orking on the front lines of digital business. The
more than 80 thousand active Drupalcommunity members believe that
together w e can create a better product by w orking w ith it,
giving back code,sharing, and collaborating rather than reinventing
the w heel for every client or project.
Bob Kerner, SVP and Chief Digital Off icer of NYSE Euronext w
hich runs its w eb infrastructure of tens of thousandsof pages on
Drupal talks about this head start effect:
I believe in the success of the open source model - when you get
developers excited aboutbuilding in open source they become really
engaged in the environment. They want to reap thebenefits of the
community and solve problems within the community, and that helps
outeveryone." quote via networkworld.com
The benefit for you is clear: using Drupal core plus installing
contributed plug-in modules and doing configuration in theadmin
interface w ill often get you 80% of the w ay to your f inished
product w ithout custom coding. Drupal distributionscan get you
even closer. They are like pre-assembled, pre-configured starter
kits that solve common business caseslike running a school,
managing a hotel, government w ebsites (Canada, Australia, United
States), eCommerce, andmuch, much more.
The thousands of Drupal modules 6000+ for Drupal 7 function as
building blocks of digital functionality that youcan assemble into
a complete digital experience. Once you have built your w ebsite,
application, app, or w hathaveyouand you know the capabilities of
your module set, you can re-use, re-arrange, and re-assemble those
modules intoother, different experiences, repurposing those blocks
of functionality over and over again.
Not only do Drupal and its plug-in modules give you a headstart
on their ow n; anything you have built or configuredbefore can also
be copied and reused to make your next project or deployment even
faster! You have no licensinglimits on the number of developers,
templates, environments, or copies of Drupal you can ow n and use
at any given
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time. You can build a solution once and reuse it any number of
times, thereby reducing your per-use cost every timeyou implement a
similar solution.
Who is working faster with Drupal?Warner Music Group supports
200+ artists on a common Drupal platform, w hich offers WMG a set
of sharedbusiness and presentation management capabilities, as w
ell as rapid site deployment for new artists--each of w homhas
their ow n individual design and interface needs. WMGs Drupal
platform offers each artist that unique, custom-branded experience
and community building tools for their fans; as w ell as promoting
and selling their recordings,products, music, t-shirts, concert
tickets, etc.
VML, the digital agency, built their main page, vml.com, on
Drupal and met w ith a lot of success (both w ith Drupal andtheir
business). Then they started expanding a lot. They built a small
number of Drupal site templates to reuseacross w hat is now a
global company and site infrastructure. They can rapidly deploy a
new site, reusing the basicplatform (modules, configuration, etc.),
restyling it, and f illing it w ith relevant, localised content.
Furthermore, they cando all of this w ithout any additional license
costs or per-seat, per-developer, or per-user limits.
Johnson & Johnson Consumer division w orks w ith numerous
digital agencies around the globe. Centering onDrupal as its w eb
technology of choice gives it eff iciency, saves costs, and
maintains compatibility and technicaloversight. Digital service
providers are given J&Js reusable Drupal 7 reference
implementation as a site buildingplatform and quickly assemble
rebranded, localised sites for each market, all on a common
infrastructure.
J&J Consumer division includes 48 brands, which are sold
globally, and presented digitallyvia over 750 websites worldwide.
Prior to the creation and release of the solutions platform,each
brand and global region had the autonomy to build and host their
website(s) independentof any coding or branding standards the
result of which is a portfolio of brand websites thatare disparate
from one another, and costly to maintain. The objective of the OPEN
SolutionsPlatform was to standardize the J&J Brand websites
onto a best in class referencearchitecture, built on Drupal 7.
Goals of the platform include governance standards, ability
tomaintain a single platform with regional feature set(s),
automated testing and a rich feature setwhich cares for 95% of the
use cases for the J&J Brand websites globally. via
DrupalConAustin
In Deliver digital faster with Drupal Part 2 ...In the second
part of this post, Ill examine how this eff icient site production
and reusable modular system w ork tomanage your project costs and
risks above and beyond the savings inherent in a product you can
use over andover again. Stay tuned for Part 2 next w eek: same
time, same Bat channel!
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