This is the story of how Drupal became the CMS of choice at Stanford University, going from a handful of sites in 2006 to hundreds of sites today. Rather than a top-down decision, it was a gradual process that began as a grassroots initiative culminating in central support and development.
The motto of the University is "die luft der freiheit weht" —that sentiment permeates all levels of the organization and its entrepreneurial spirit. The inherent flexibility and power of the Drupal platform, coupled with an ardent in-house developer base, is why Drupal continues to grow at Stanford and across the higher education vertical. This presentation is a detailed account of the steps required to bring Drupal beyond the Tipping Point at Stanford, and the enormous ROI we are witnessing now.
The market for Drupal services is maturing, and so must our offers. In order to stay relevant and be competitive as more enterprise customers enter the market, Drupal shops need to shift focus to delivering business value, and not just code. In this session I will talk about how NodeOne's offer centering around business value, rather than just "sites done to spec", has changed how we work and whom we work with. How much more fun we have now. And how you can do the same.
Larger Drupal projects are usually not handled by one service provider alone. There usually is one lead agency that then adds partners for specialized development, hosting, design, SEO, information architecture and other aspects of the project.
Learn about the real values offered by the open source model and how to pitch it without "sounding like a software hippie".
Using open source solutions like Drupal can save you money. Hurray! The bottom line always counts, especially today. No one should be wasting money. When businesses waste money, they shut down. When governments waste money, there are much worse, much broader consequences.
But there are important reasons to use open source solutions beyond the price tag. The "Four Freedoms" that define open source software also define real business value: innovation, cost-savings, and risk mitigation. If you understand the true value in open source software and in a massively successful project like Drupal, you can bring your organization real benefits and add real value.
Let's think open source (let's think Drupal!), be its champions and explain it to our colleagues, bosses, friends, and decision makers: whether your MP, European bureaucracy, or marketing department.
We want to say hello, welcome the attendees, spend a few words on the coming days and get some update what from our host on the updates from Microsoft and the bridge to Drupal.
After this session we start straight with the Open Space event to discuss many interesting topics.
A few topics that might interest you, where you are welcome to discuss them with Alessandro Pilotti (IT):
Benefits of IIS and the MS stack for Drupal (including a demo of WebPi, fast-cgi and WinCache)
Drupal on Azure
Drupal and SQL Server
Scalability on IIS (ARR, WFF)
Symfony on the MS stack in a Drupal 8 perspective
Drupal 8 and mobile devices. We might spend a few words on WP7 and IE9
