@FIRST_LIGHT

In 2006, I wrote this: http://buytaert.net/sharepoint-2007.

I think the problem with completely putting the term CMS to rest is that there really aren't many terms available that best describes what software like Drupal is all about. Your mention of SharePoint in this post is well suited for this discussion as I really see SharePoint and Drupal capable of the same functions behind the corporate firewall. But even Microsoft has had a tough time describing what SharePoint is to their customers.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.

Whew, you and I know what Microsoft is trying to say, but try describing that to the boss! However, I do think their slogan for SharePoint captures the heart of Web 2.0 (and could just as easily be describing Drupal), "Connecting people, process, and information".

The problem with describing Drupal as "social software" is that the enterprise is just as confused with that term as it has been with CMS. Andrew McAfee, Harvard, is a big Enterprise 2.0 advocate and has been an advocate for businesses to adopt the technologies that software such as Drupal has to offer to the enteprise. You get a sense from his writings that this is an uphill battle for bringing social and collaboration software to the enterprise, but a battle that can be won. One of the most inspirational posts I've seen from him is The Ties that Find and it gave me my own thoughts for my own blog post.

So no, I don't think the term CMS is holding Drupal back. What I do think though is we're just not sure how to throw the other terms out there that make sense to non-IT managers and financial decision makers who need to buy off implementing social software within the enterprise. I'm starting to wonder though if we just need to drop the term "content" and describe it in the broader "management system". For the business people, Drupal becomes a management system to meet your team collaboration and content management needs. For the external Web 2.0 folks, Drupal becomes a management system to meet your social networking needs. I don't know...we have to do better...but as I have said before the problem isn't with the term CMS but the fact we don't know how best to describe Drupal when the sum of all its parts are put together.

I think though, this confusion in the enterprise isn't going to last long and this is the right opportunity for Drupal! For companies that don't want to make a significant investment in something like SharePoint because they're unsure how it can help them, Drupal is a fantastic alternative to SharePoint. Since SharePoint is geared to meet the needs of the enterprise, you have to wonder how well suited it will be to meet those smaller groups within the enterprise with demographics or an IT culture that doesn't fit the corporate mold. I think most large organizations now recognize while they need to support the stable well established enterprise software...they have to allow for the "cutting edge" applications to also be explored within their own organization. That's where I see Drupal making headway into organizations...and if you insist as "social software".

For my own organization, I'm actually advocating the use of both SharePoint and Drupal. I really see SharePoint well suited for taking on the collaboration and content management needs at our national and regional offices. But our field offices have needs that are unique to the middle and upper levels of the organization. Budgeting each field office to have their own SharePoint server is out of the question...so what do you do? You're going to look for alternatives and for me that is Drupal.

In a lot of ways, Drupal can be to SharePoint what BlackBerry has become to Microsoft Exchange. While Drupal can stand on it's own (just as BlackBerry does), it also has the power to coexist with Microsoft's products. Companies are much more willing to be open to open source software such as Drupal, if they know it won't lead them to a dead-end and no way back to the their enterprise applications.

Would the Drupal community be happy with making Drupal more compatible with Microsoft? I'll leave that answer to those that know the answer better than I do. But what about a private company who desires for the business world to apply the best of open source into their applications? Hmmm...

“The great thing about Drupal is that it does all of this (minus social networking)”

Why do you say “minus social networking”? Drupal has tons of social networking modules and powers many SN sites.

Michelle

Good Article. Funny enough, when I am demonstrating the power of Drupal to people in my industry it is often compared to Sharepoint. I feel that Drupal has major advantages from a technical standpoint over sharepoint, the main one being that it is open source, and interoperability with other open projects will NEVER be an issue.
I do not think that the branding of CMS to Drupal is holding Drupal deployment back, but instead, the Brand Drupal is not as well known as us geeks think it is. Yes, those of us who work with it and live in this Drupal bubble may find it hard to believe, but many people don’t know what Drupal is. Whereas, if you tag Microsoft in front of the word Sharepoint, you immediately get brand recognition, and people fall into a comfort zone, as blind as that comfort zone may be. The key to Drupal becoming a platform, for not just social networking sites, but all database driven dynamic Web 2.0 content is to have more presence in the Business arena.
I am hoping, with the growth of Drupal consulting businesses, and of course, the creation of Acquia, people will know what you are talking about when you say, “Drupal can change your business, want to know how?”

I think that the term CMS still has some life left to it since its commonality brings in new persons, like myself, through research and inquiry. In a couple years the term will garner a new definition that is in reference to the new term.

It is possible to get some of the social software market without question but it’ll take some heavy duty marketing. The persons installing SharePoint 2007 now are the ones that are already ‘married’ to Microsoft. Great example is my IT manager boss loves SP but has no clue whats under the hood and what it takes to keep it running. He comes from using Microsoft products for the past 10 years or so, specifically Microsoft Exchange. Microsoft’s legacy in the market plus the psychology of ‘if you charge for something people will pay’ is the only reason why SP is “successful”.

What’s missing for Drupal—- this is just my opinion—- is corporate presence. But this has changed. Acquia is the best step forward. Think of it in terms like a group of techies holding a Drupal flag. In the corporate eyes, that doesn’t matter until a building is flying the Drupal flag.

Very interesting and well thought out post.

In the future, can you consider breaking out your posts into paragraphs, bullets, etc?

This post graphically looked like a wall of words and made it very difficult to scan.

Thanks,

John

• Do you think we should put the CMS term to bed? *

I am not sure “CMS” is ready to go to bed yet. I agree with some of the other comments on this post and don’t see a better way to describe it either. What Drupal needs is a new definition that sets it apart from the other YACMS’s. The problem with Drupal is it’s marketing and it needs to move from a project to product status.

Drupal is extremely powerful as we all know. However, its power is hard to describe and not obviously realized by newbie’s. For example, I had to pay a Drupal coach to teach before I understood the true value of CCK and Views. I would have never understood this without having a one-on-one session from an expert. I think one of the areas that could be explored is Druapal’s power to exploit a taxonomies. I think one of Drupal’s true powers is it’s ability to glue om the fly taxonomies with a relational database structure on the fly.

• Would it be possible to grab some of that team collaboration social software market opportunity for the Drupal community? *

Druapal needs to be easier to use out-of-the-box. I have not looked at V6 yet but modules like CCK, Views, and Wiki-tools need to be part of the base install maybe the core. Also, it was darn near impossible for me to setup wiki as an input format (not really - but harder than I thought it would be). There wasn’t really a good how-to on this. I had to bounce through a few different blogs and then make some guesses. If we want Druapl to be prime-time something like this needs to be turn-key. I love Drupal and would like to use it for every project I use, however I don’t want to become a Drupal core expert to be able to use it. When I was being coached on how to use Druapl, my coach asked me if I knew PHP and when I said no he almost ended the session. I don’t have to know .Net to use Sharepoint.

• Why isn’t there already a billion dollar Drupal services ecosystem for team collaboration? What’s missing? *

Billion dollar service organizations based on open source projects are one-in-a-million. Beyond the first and second tier of open sources (i.e., os, and databases) there aren’t a lot of name brand oss service organizations in general. The successfully tier 1/2 oss products all have a nemesis. Linux has Windows, MySQL/PosgreSQL have Oracle. Drupal needs an enemy that is not Joomla or Wordpress.

Obviously these are tough questions that you guys need to address. When I have no idea on how to do something I look for someone else that is having success. Maybe pick up some clues from Alfresco and SugarCRM. I could probably spend all day talking about this (I love Drupal). Unfortunately my day jobs doesn’t allow me to do that.

BTW, just pay Gartner 50k and they will gladly give CMS a new name :)

My 2 cents

John,

I was thinking of proposing a session called something like “What’s in a name? Drupal, Xanadu, hypertext, transclusion and Web Publishing 2.0.” (You’ve reminded me to put in a call to Ted Nelson.)

From my standpoint — starting with Tripod.com before it had even a name, progressing through a Ph.D. program in Rhetoric and on to the Xanadu “original hypertext” folks— providing a name for something that is essentially new in the world is a difficult thing. Was there hypertext before Ted called it hypertext?

Is Drupal really a hypertextual system?

Calling something a “Content Management System” (or Framework) or GroupWare (is that what SharePoint is?) or, egads, “Web 2.0” (speaking of a near-meaningless term) is, after all, at best, an attempt to give a meaningful label to something we don’t quite understand— and certainly can’t pigeonhole— in a shifting industry, in a time of rapidly changing technology.

SharePoint is social? Most of what we (at the Horton Group) use is for is sort of advanced, not-quite-SVN, always available group folders… ignoring its other aspects, which we do better on other tools and platforms. Blog via Sharepoint, Wiki— Wiki?!?!— you’ve got to be kidding. SharePoint does a few things well, a few things ok… and for a lot of things, it’s a horrible solution hoisted upon poor, wretched people whose employers do not know better.

“Chat—” or “instant messaging—” something I played with at Tripod on the side, before Steve Case found a more popular way to do it? SharePoint has some interesting features, along with collaborative document management— though at other times this is just clunky. It’s OK; I don’t know of anything better in the PC/Mac/or Windows world.

But Solaris… in many ways, a lot of the above functions or functionalities were implemented well (better) by the Sun 2 series: if you were one of the lucky people to be “online” in the mid-80s, and you could afford a Sun workstation, its “group” file sharing capacities (etc) were better than SharePoint’s.

By and large, none of the above is included in Drupal (there is a chat plug-in, (but…) . So if you view SharePoint as a tool which accomplishes the above tasks— well or not— Drupal is really not, evidently, in the same space.

I tend to describe Drupal as a web publishing platform akin to Vignette— or others— platforms whose buy-in starts at $300K, and then you have to hire someone at $100K + load to install it.

What I am getting at is not easy to put into a few words (much less buzzwords)— but (HTML-)Apache, an individual academic-demo “web publishing tool” which only sprang into wide use with Nate Kruz turning it into a branching-server program at Tripod, has never been a very sophisticated or “high-level” tool for dealing with and publishing text on the web. It publishes; it allows links; it now has conventions for formatting, and that’s about it.

The big corporations— IBM, Xerox, Ford, etc.— have always had access to much bigger tools — at least judged in terms of dollars and budgets, but also by functionalities and possibilities. Last I had a — trial, discounted via the help of a VP— version of IBM’s search tool, (a beast written in a combo of C and Perl and other junk)— it cost $100K and did great stuff, like automatically cache the webpages you told it to crawl in a (IBM proprietary) database and, in addition to auto-tagging them via taxonomies (define them yourself or let the tool make up taxonomies), spit them back out in various structured HTML and other markup formats, ready for reuse…

Is that a search tool? It sure as heck ain’t the same thing as Google!

Drupal, as I see it, is a multifaceted web publishing tool (you can call it “online collaboration” if you want, but if you call it “social networking,” don’t expect that term to be in common use in a decade). Just like SharePoint— whose functionalities are all over the board (and partially a revision of PARC’s “paperless office,” and partially, after all, a revision of Lotus)— it’s hard to say exactly what it is, and in fact, not entirely clear. Is SharePoint a CMS? It accomplishes some of those functions, but…

From the point of view of Xanadu— the “original hypertext project”— two things are clear to me. First, Drupal is, approached from a general sense, an online, “internet” tool for publishing (sharing), collectively working with and using information— a parallel equivalent to the web/webserver, and to WAIS, older systems like Socrates, 123/Notes, and etc. Second, it is one of a small number of open projects which make some of the publishing power and possibilities of “things like Vignette” available to — anyone and everyone.

The problem with the Vignettes of the world— other than that they have only been available to corporations and governments— and that they are closed-source, and that means not just in code, but that what they do is largely hidden to the public— is that they are, like so much of the web today, deeply fragmented.

Vignette does things one way; TeamSite, another; Documentum, get another; and between the three, there is no common framework, overlap, or exchange. You cannot at all easily share a document with someone in one system, with someone in another, or publish it (and comments) to a “website” built on the other system.

Why should there be? What does this have to do with Drupal (and what Drupal is or should be).

Well, my time is up— I’m late for dinner plans, and I had meant to talk about transclusion.

Maybe slightly off-topic, but I posted a brain-dump/follow-up at http://buytaert.net/from-infinite-extensibility-to-infinite-interoperability.

I suspect the CMS name still has a little gas left in it. But I also feel it is inaccurate to almost the same extent that calling Drupal “social publishing software” is. That latter name implies Drupal is not good at building non-social web applications, or not good at building non-publishing web applications. Yet it is.

As I’ve been saying since at least February, 2006 — when I got up and talked about it in an “Enterprise” session at DrupalCon Vancouver — Drupal is a web application development platform in which a powerful CMS is one built-in implementation.[1] Drupal’s basic core, although slanted towards CMS operations support, really has all the key elements to enable the construction of just about any web application.

As someone who wrote a bunch of web applications from scratch, I really appreciate that Drupal handles the database abstraction for me, handles the prevention of things like SQL injection, cross-site scripting attacks and other sorts of security risks — all using best practices and thoroughly evaluated by dozens, maybe hundreds, of very smart developers. Other parts of the framework are getting there, too. Drupal 6 and internationalization and localization, is an example. Drupal really provides a very powerful toolkit for building far more kinds of things than fit into the CMS or social publishing monikers.

I think if we (the Drupal development communnity) don’t falter, Drupal will become a dominant player. PHP has its detractors, as does MySQL, two technologies Drupal is quite dependent upon now. But if we can solve the most pressing dozen problems without injuring one group of developers by making their lives more difficult (i.e. Drupal becomes less useful than changing technologies to something else, e.g. Ruby on Rails), there is a good future ahead.

[1] Thanks to Nedjo and/or others for the more succinct wording.

CMS is dead. Long live WAF

I agree that CMS is a limiting term. We’ve now moved beyond the notion of content management to a much broader space which is about delivering tools to non-programmers that enable us to build web applications. Hence the term ‘web application framework’ is I think a succinct description of Drupal and where it is/should be headed.

In terms of the barriers to Drupal’s success, for me one of the biggest issues is that clients seem to almost want more complex solutions. They seem convinced that their requirements are so unique that only bespoke and costly coding from scratch can meet their needs. My biggest problem is convincing them that Drupal can not only meet the vast majority of their needs out of the box, but with a little training they can probably do the rest of the development themselves, with no knowledge of PHP.

Taking ownership of this emerging space, and creating the required credibility around/confidence in the product (especially amongst corporate clients, for many of whom open source remains somewhat leftfield - still in that ‘no-one ever got fired for buying IBM’ mindset) to convince narcissistic clients that their problems are not so obscure as to require rocket scientists to solve them, could place Drupal in a commanding position.

Goodbye CMS, hello WAF.