Selling Drupal. Not a contradiction but not as easy as selling a license of a proprietary CMS. Selling something that is "free" (gratis) seems like an odd idea to many. So how do we get our beloved Drupal CMS spread in a broader range that home blogs, new media sites and the like?

Well, some prospects have functional requirements for their CMS like "It has to start with a D and end with Drupal". Usually there is a passionate user somewhere in the ICT department that convinced some people to go for Drupal. And while this technocratic approach does have its drawbacks, it is a good way to gain more ground and bring Drupal on a higher level.

But most of the time the prospect "just wants a CMS". And since there are zillions of Open Source CMS-es it is hard to choose. Most OSS CMS-es do not have a local "sales" so the company will end up with a proprietary CMS that is years lagging, only have a dozen developers and a couple of hundreds users but with a sales person that is a member of the same club as the CEO.

However, now most bigger companies are moving towards their third CMS implementation, people know what they want from a CMS and people are actually looking for an Open Source CMS and hence an Open Source implementer like my employer is in the Netherlands. And those bigger enterprises all read Gartner, Forrester, MetaGroup and other IT research and advisory companies. I have a very strong opinion about those companies (just echoing yesterdays news for companies that will be in today by tomorrow) but that is a different story. In the boardroom magic quadrants, hype cycles and two by two tables are the goal for any powerpoint wisdom, so if you want to be in the boardroom you have to play chess on the management chessboard; a 2 x 2 matrix.

CNet (writing many rtiles about Drupal in a positive way!) has a piece called Forrester calls out Alfresco and Drupal as the top-two open-source WCM systems. This is really /great/ news, instant boardroom Fähigkeit for Drupal. Forrester says so so we need Drupal!

You can read the excerpt of the report over at Forrester:

This document answers frequently asked questions about the role that open source plays in the WCM market.

You have to pay for the real article but even without reading 20 pages about community, functionality etc, I think it is fine to say that Drupal will be a word you can say in the boardroom from now on. "Could you please fill my cup with some coffee Drupal's" for example.

Thanks to Kieran and others who gave input for the report

Today I was a guest speaker at the business day of the Dutch Joomla Days. While this might seem odd, the subject of these days is "building bridges". Building bridges towards other CMS-es, other databases, other communities and hence towards Drupal.

I give these kinds of "pro Drupal" talks almost a bi-weekly basis now, where often other CMS-es are present as well. Last week I did one at eduvision where 100+ people where impressed by Drupal. Most often, the "competition" is Joomla and Typo3, both rather popular in The Netherlands (and Germany). While I do think that Joomla is good (enough) for the SoHo market and the audience of Drupal is much broader (from enterprises to personal blogs) and deeper (from video towards for example a resume site), these CMS-es are often compared. So normally, I try to make clear why Drupal is so much better then Joomla; better user management, roles, hooks, CCK, views, workflow, tableless design, multi-site install and almost forgotten but still miles ahead of any other CMS; taxonomy. There are zillion of ways where Drupal is clearly the leader in the field, but leading is sometimes not the same as "fitting".

This time however, I tried not too bash Joomla to much but to start building bridges. We do have a lot of the same problems that we can work on together. For example, we both use the GPL and we both have to protect our assets. Be both have a legal body protecting the community and facilitating the community, in Drupal's case, the Drupal Association.

That is why I was interested in the talk of one other speaker; James Vasile. James works for the SFLC and he is on the board of OpenSourceMatters and helping as a legal counsel for the Drupal Association. Most of the other Board Members of the Association spoke to James on the Boston DrupalCon ut since I was not there, it was good to speak to James during Lunch.

We taled about his passion, RMS, his other Open source projects / customers, how the SFLC is financed and the GPL3 as well as some other things. It is good to say the face you have exchanged mails with and it is good to build a relation between the SFLC, Joomla and Drupal. Communications is all about building bridges.

(Panorama view in full)
Since this month I am working over at Dutch Open Projects, an Open Source implementer in the Netherlands that specialises in PHP; zend, symfony, SugarCRM, Joomla and Drupal. Doing both Drupal and Joomla is fine with me, both have a place in the CMS landscape. And the goals of DOP is to offer the right Open Source solution for the customers needs, not to start a holly war of one Open Source tool against another.

Since the headquarter of DOP is located at a very nice place, we often hold x-camps at our place. Dont be surprised that a deer wonders by the swimmingpool out of the forrest behind our villa! Some time ago we had the SymfonyCamp over at our place. And we do have enough room for lots of tents and a BBQ.

See the full symfony pool at fickr.

We are planning on organizing a Joomla!/Drupal camp over a next couple of month. And the use the healthy competition between the two projects and to use the power of Open Source, we had the following idea:

From both communities a couple of dozen people can signup and camp at our place for a weekend. During this weekend both have the assignment to make as many migration tools as possible to migrate from the dominant proprietary CMS-es in the Netherlands; GX, Greenvaley, Smartsite and Tridion towards their CMS. The one who does the most or best wins. And since all the migration code has to be GPL, the Open Source community at large wins as well!

Note that this is only the first idea, we have to get "development licenses" for all these CMS-es and provide demo installs of all these as well. So the final assignment might be different from this one if this one is not practical. Our goal is not to make profit of the camp, not by far. So the entrenance fee will be free or very low. Why do we invest in these camps? To align with the communities, to get exposure but most of all to give the proprieatry CMS users a way out towards freedom. And we hope it doesnt hurt for our recruiting proces; we are hiring!

We try to get many high ranking officers from both communities to (re)present their CMS but there will be room as well for "the soldiers". If you are interested, drop a comment; it will be published within 8 hours. Or you can drop me a line; bertATborlanDOTcm. I will post more information about this "J/D vs the RotW" camp when it comes available.

And yes, our halfpipe pool will be cleaned before this event I hope, so be sure to bring your bikini as well