Drupal deemed a Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace

Drupal has been named by Gartner as a Visionary solution for social software in the workplace. TP1 Internet 360 believes that this reinforces Drupal as the strongest open-source solution currently available for intranets, collaboration-driven websites and extranets.

Drupal is in the Visionaries quadrant because of its use of the open-source model to drive adoption and popularity, while providing enterprise services via organizations such as Acquia.

Drupal's strength as a content management platform for Internet sites, coupled with its vision for the workplace now make it an integrated enterprise-level solution for publishing and collaboration.

The Gartner study

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The products evaluated by Gartner in this study are used primarily among employees within an organization to support teaming, communities and networking. The selected products help create virtual environments in which participants can produce, organize and share information, as well as find, connect and interact with one another. Products in the social software market help users to:

• Find out about each other;
• Form teams, communities or informal groups;
• Collaborate on shared work objects;
• Discuss and comment on their work;
• Organize work from their perspective;
• Identify relevant work;
• Discover other people with common interests;
• Learn from others’ expertise.

Each of the reviewed products were required to offer all of the following functionality:

• User management: the ability to create, modify or retire user accounts.
• User profiles: information about each user can that be accessed by other users.
• Roles and access control: support for multiple roles (for example, editor, facilitator, community manager, moderator) with associated access controls.
• Configurable group, project, team or community areas: end users with the right permissions can create themed areas for a group, project, team or community.
• Document sharing: the ability to upload, store, organize and share documents.
• Discussion forums: support for a persistent environment to post questions and answers or to have general discussions.
• Blogs: end-user instant publishing functionality that displays entries in reverse chronological order and permits comments from others.
• Wikis: group authoring of collections of pages with support for “click-to-edit,” change tracking and linking.

Gartner identified the following three strengths of the Drupal platform:

1. Drupal offers a popular and extensive open-source platform with large high-profile deployments, a very active developer community with over 600,000 members, a good track record of community support, and a growing ecosystem of service providers.
2. Also available in a commercially supported version, Acquia Drupal, from Acquia – a commercial venture-capital funded organization headed by the founder of the Drupal open-source project.
3. Its strong content-centric, community and web application foundation is being rapidly extended with hundreds of modules, including many for collaboration and social interaction support.

Source: Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace, Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00171792, Nikos Drakos, Carol Rozwell, Anthony Bradley, Jeffrey Mann, 22 October 2009, R3220 05052010.