Today my employer Dutch Open Projects launched the website for Radio Nederland Wereldomroep. The public broadcasting system in the Netherlands is endless complex, so I will not explain that system here. But Radio Nederland Wereldomroep (Radio Netherlands Worldwide) is a very old international public broadcaster, with regular transmissions starting back in 1927 to the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. More information about RNW can be found in the wiki entry.

The site rnw.nl has more then 100 writers in eleven editorial staffs and writes in six languages, including Arabic and Chinese. Building the site in three months with Drupal sure was fun. We had a team of three coders and two themers (and me as consultant) that created the site using D6, lots of contributed modules and custom code. We choose to use Organic Groups for the editorial staffs, making it possible to cross-post content in multiple groups and write in one group in multiple languages. I am not the biggest fan of OG but it fitted the business requirements and worked very well.

By itself, the fact that Radio Netherlands Worldwide switches from a proprietary CMS towards an Open Source CMS is not the biggest news. However, the switch is a milestone since it symbolises that companies and NFP that didn't look to Open Source and only listened to the proprietary prietpraat are moving over; we are winning! Lost of newspapers, broadcasters and other companies are ditching the proprietary CMS-es and migrate towards Open Source. I have seen business cases where just the migrating costs from a proprietary CMS towards an Open Source CMS were lower then the yearly license costs. In the Netherlands, the financial crisis is not as bad as in many other countries in the world, but the crisis sure make people look towards how to spend many well. It used to be true that people switched towards Open Source because of the quality and stayed for the (lack of) cost. Now people switch because of the money they save and stay for the quality! The Open Source market is booming in the Netherlands. (Note that it can also backfire, I see a lot of companies using Open Source tools without knowing the pitfalls, have a failing implementation and thereby give Drupal or Open Source a bad name.)

The site is not finished yet, both content and coding wise there is some work to do. That is one of the disadvantages of a time boxed approach. However, meeting a deadline, having a dedicated professional team that worked 36 hours in two days during Pentecost, sure is a adrenaline boost. With the Wereldomroep being a switcher and another public broadcaster in the Netherlands (NCRV) that has been using Drupal for a long time for many sites and more to come (more news soon ), the future of Drupal in the low lands is looking bright!