I'm happy to share another huge success for Drupal; The World Economic Forum (WEF) has launched its own internal collaboration platform in Drupal. The Forum is a non-profit foundation based in Geneva, known for its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
Top business leaders, politicians, journalists and select intellectuals meet there to discuss the most pressing issues facing the world, including health and the environment. Their World Economic Leaders Community is dedicated to discussing the most pressing issues and challenges of a globalized world online. This means that world leaders are using Drupal! They just held a meeting in Davos to evaluate the new collaboration platform.
The Forum switched to Drupal from their existing closed-source solution that was built using cutting-edge technologies but was not flexible enough. They wanted to add new features quickly and efficiently, and their previous system was not able to keep up with their needs. Additionally, the previous platform was a collection of different technologies, which although proprietary, caused the site to perform very poorly.
So they turned to the advantages of open source technology and Drupal to find solutions. They decided to use 'Drupal Commons', a pre-configured Drupal distribution for social websites, as the technology platform for their community. Drupal Commons is a social software very similar to Jive Software that integrates groups, discussion forums, blogs wikis and events in a pre-packaged solution. This allowed the Forum to quickly accelerate the articulation of a social collaboration community, based on Drupal and the features they needed.
The legacy platform took several years to build, while the Drupal Commons solution was implemented in just a few months. Many organizations, including Nvidia, Symantec, Turner Broadcasting and many others already use Drupal to power their virtual community sites.
Drupal Commons makes this process easier by packaging it, along with key modules, content types, and theme snippets, into an installation profile that's ready to go out of the box. Thanks to Drupal, organizations still have the flexibility to modify Commons to extend its capabilities, enable/disable features, and gain utility by accessing Drupal community resources. This was the first step for the World Economic Forum - and we're excited to see our world leaders take the next step with Drupal.
By Dries Buytaert