George Washington University going Drupal

Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis is using Drupal heavily for content management. All of our sites are currently running Drupal 6. (We just upgraded the last Drupal 5 site in January.) We're looking at Drupal 7 right now in development. I would say that your choice of version may depend on your timeline. Version 7 is still pretty young, and there are a number of major contributed modules that provide key functionality that are still in alpha. That said, if you are just in the planning stages and don't intend to actually roll out sites in the next 6 months, Drupal 7 is probably the correct direction.

Yes, SF State is, along with quite a number of other universities. Might be nice to have a list of those doing centrally-managed Drupal as the enterprise CMS as I guess it could be a fairly limited number since anecdotal evidence points to most university departments still hosting distributed instances without central management. Yes also on using Drupal 7, though we are not rolling it out to campus until July.

I strongly suggest you plan for using Drupal 7 because your migration process is going to take a number of months, in which in the meantime the modules you need will have made stable releases.

You are in good company :) Stanford has similar plans that are currently evolving. I will likely have more to report in about 6 months. Yale has a rather robust deployment at http://drupal.yale.edu/, and Harvard has OpenScholar, which isn't exactly institution-wide, but a pretty big deal nonetheless. Duke is pretty heavily into Drupal. For PSU look up ELMS. Princeton is about where we are, just getting started at the institutional level (we've had a thriving grassroots community for years). Arizona State has a pretty sweet in-house team as well. Those are just off the top of my head, of course there are many more!!

I strongly recommend that you consider when you plan to take your site(s) live, and plan around that. There are many components that aren't quite ready now, but have a very high probability of being completed by the time you launch.

Another thing that you should consider - building. I don't know which commercial CMS you are using, but I would venture a guess that for the price of a year's licenses, you could fund the work (either in-house or out) to finish a few modules that you need. That would be a big win-win for you and the community.

tonsof drupal usage at penn state but the movement and implementations are highly decentralizes at the moment

http://drupal.psu.edu has 110 sites at the moment but the real number is probably closer to 180ish with many more in the works

University of Chicago is in the process of spinning up some new sites in Drupal 7. We're starting with fairly low-profile sites while D7 settles down a little bit. We also have a number of existing sites in Drupal 6.

University of North Texas endorsed Drupal as the official, centralized CMS. We have over 500 separate sites, and while that sprawl comes with some serious support burden, it also jump started (or JATO-boosted) the Drupal culture here. The push towards central web management has forced many disparate departments to make critical and overdue IA decisions and old site pruning.

We use far more carrots than sticks, and departments are continually moving to our centralized hosting and maintenance. After DrupalconSF, we started a Drupal user group, and we started hosting open office hours to meet with folks in person. The human interaction has been a big part of the deployment success.

In a cool way, the push towards Drupal has forced our institution to recognize and overcome old barriers, and it's had a unifying effect on aesthetics, branding, accessibility, and security. We didn't have a platform to provide standardized design before Drupal. I should say, having our own ticketing system (built in Drupal, of course), has been crucial. We've recently deployed an Openscholar pilot, which we hope can centralize faculty bios and cut down on custom one-off requests.

All,

Some questions about your use of Drupal:
1. One Drupal install used by all sites?
2. A common set of templates for all to use?
3. Do site owners have the ability to design their own templates?
4. How do you handle modules? A common set installed and supported? What about requests for module installation?
5. Can you detail the environment? Machine(s), OS, Database

Thanks in advance,

We're working on an installation where multiple sites (at least tens, maybe hundreds eventually) will share a common template. Each site will be a separate site in a multisite install with its own database. All will point to /sites/all to access one of four offered themes and shared modules. Content types and views will be managed through Features, while a number of configuration variables will be managed via Strongarm. So we'll have a fair amount of control across all the sites. We're considering Aegir for multisite management.

Site owners will have fairly restricted permissions. They can administer content, blocks, and non-admin users, and they can choose their theme, but they can't administer content types, views, modules, or most configuration options. Giving them block administration gives them the ability to break their site, but we might figure out a way to lock that down to some extent.

Modules will be common to all sites. Initially, we probably won't be taking requests for module installation since everyone is sharing a common set of features. At some point, we'll likely address one-off or custom installations which require additional modules or where the client will have more administrative permissions.

I don't have any details on machines/environment yet.