Fun with Drupal Commons, a Powerful Solution for Online Community Building

For years, we have been advising clients on how to build, manage, and grow successful online communities. In these engagements, we have relied on our mantra, "people first, technology second," encouraging our clients to focus their energy on providing useful content, facilitating sharing, and connecting people, and to avoid a disproportionate focus on technology questions. This hasn't changed. However, the tools continue to get better and better, and we are excited to begin working with Acquia's Drupal Commons, a recent entrant into the enterprise collaboration fray.  

Similar to Open Atrium and Jive, Commons blends web content management and enterprise 2.0 functionality (blogs, documents, wikis, profiles, groups, etc) and can support open, partially open, and closed community sites. It is a powerful hybrid, combining many of the best features of Jive together with Drupal's powerful taxonomy tools and Acquia's awesome faceted search. I also like how it handles "wiki posts,"using more of a metadata-driven approach to organizing and presenting wiki pages (as opposed to standard wiki navigation). In our experience, this often works better for cross-organizational communities.  Although we haven't quite gotten there yet, we expect to be able to do a better job supporting traditional web content management in Commons, which at times can be quite challenging in Jive.

All that said, there are still plenty of rough edges. Available themes for Commons are fairly rudimentary at this point — the UI of the demo site is decidedly less slick than some Jive and Open Atrium (here's a cool one we launched recently). But now that the Drupal Community has their hands on it, we expect to see it mature quickly and are excited to help drive the evolution. Stay tuned!