Hi All--
I teach at a large Chinese university where I use a Drupal teaching site I built for a growing 200+ students, and for the last 2 months I've been helping another CS group create their first site in Drupal. They seem pretty thoroughly impressed with what we've done with severely limited people and time, and the dialogue seems to be moving towards the idea of developing and deploying more sites with Drupal. They currently have a mix of html static, .net and custom php stuff but not much cohesion or even very well updated or maintained sites.
I am looking to create a "sales pitch" for using Drupal (should I be pitching Drupal 6, 7 or a combination of both?) in higher education.
I'm looking for:
(1.) a speech / ppt / bullet-point list with some of the advantages that Drupal might provide for a university
(2.) a simple distro / sample site that I might quickly relogo to show them what a university site might look and work like with Drupal (I can take care internationalizing it for Chinese myself). I'd especially like something like a departmental setup since that would be the most likely initial push.
Also any other advice on how to "pitch" to university, non-technical administrators?
Comments
Doing more with less is key
Doing more with less resources has been a key for us. All the systems I ramble about I've created "on my own" with a typical large-scale system taking about 4 months to develop (now). This is an incredibly compressed timeline from how we'd have to work in the past with creating everything from scratch. As for some example sites I've tried to make http://drupal.psu.edu as a showcase of Penn State's usage of Drupal. Right now there are 171 sites showcased at http://drupal.psu.edu/site_list which include everything from college and department websites to intranet, CMSs, LMS-ish, asset management, conference homes and community sites (more or less everything out there).
My wordpress blog in my sig also tried to structure an argument for Drupal as the key component to building new university infrastructures around. Email me if you'd like some presentation materials, I'm sure I have oodles around (working on one for Structured Anarchy right now).
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/