Dries Buytaert

You might remember that a while ago, Drupal was promoted to the 'Visionaries' category in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. For someone unfamiliar with all the social software vendors and projects, the choice can be overwhelming and Gartner's reports can carry a lot of weight in the decision making process. Drupal's promotion to the 'Visionaries' category was a big win for all of us.

The social software market is evolving fast, and in response Gartner is working on a presentation that compares all of the different social software players in the enterprise market, including open-source projects like Drupal. As part of that process, Acquia was invited to review the presentation and provide comments about the social software landscape and Drupal's success stories. These success stories are important to help Gartner position Drupal against its many competitors. We will also be having a followup meeting with Gartner for further discussion.

Gartner considers three different use cases for social software: (i) team collaboration software, (ii) community software and (iii) networking software. Each of these scenarios have different requirements and emphasize different features of social software. User profiles and group support seems to carry a lot of weight in their evaluations. In addition, for each of these use cases, Gartner considers two different deployment scenarios: (a) sites inside the workplace and (b) externally facing websites. This effectively creates a 3x2 matrix or grid.

To help prepare for our meeting with Gartner, and to help further Drupal's competitive positioning in the enterprise we're looking for good examples in each of those categories. Good suggestions? Post them in the comments of this blog post. Remember that Gartner is focused on the enterprise, so we're looking for examples in the enterprise that carry a lot of weight. Thanks for your help!