First, some numbers
Over the course of the last year, we have worked on 34 Drupal projects: some in development, some completed. What surprises me is not the number; a web development company with a growing portfolio of clients has to have a healthy number of projects. No, what surprises me is how we are beginning to extend the power of the Drupal platform.
When we made the decision to move from our proprietary platform, Sitesolved, last year, our rationale was to embrace a system which did the cool stuff we wanted to do: interactive blogs, media handling, dynamic forums, twitter & facebook integration etc. The groundswell of the 'tech' crowd using geeky systems is evaporating - as interfaces and software becomes user-friendly, the barriers to entry for non-tech users also disappears. I see it everywhere, and it's truly a great thing. As such, we knew we pull our socks up, provide a platform that our business users would appreciate, and ultimately, create something which brings real operational value.
Where's the value?
Real operational value. Ah, now that is where the lines have blurred. Moving our CMS was not a decision we took lightly, and we deliberately only used simple sites as our learning ground. Pages, media, forms. A bit of a lightbox effect here and there thrown in. Nothing particularly complex, but enough to show that Drupal was our particular way forward (I intend to blog more about this process to assist other developers & agencies separately). After doing a few projects however, things noticeably changed. Blogs, check. Funky Jquery integration, check. Useful catalogues, check. As we've gathered steam, we've hit all of our intended goals much earlier than planned: which is testament to the team & Drupal. We've fulfilled our brief. Or have we?
Website vs web application
I digress. Websites are our 'bread and butter', but we've always had a healthy crop of web applications in our portfolio. Due to NDAs we can't always talk about them, but after a quick SWOT analysis, I can see that they contribute to almost half of our web turnover. HALF! But, here's the point. All of these have been done with JAVA, PHP, FLEX, and a range of other technologies. Until now.
Extending to drupal to MRP
(download)
Our clients want business solutions, and these are now extending to full end integration with their chosen Inventory management system. I'm really interested to see how others are approaching this, and the Orchestra team seem to have nailed it. Strangely, we've only implemented this with Microsoft so far (via the XML / RPC protocol), but I've had 4 such requests within the last 6 weeks alone.
Maybe 'websites' won't be our bread and butter after all for 2010.
I'd love to hear from anyone else who's working on similar projects.
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