In 2008, the University of Waterloo formed a committee to select a web content management system.
In March 2009, the selection was narrowed down to three CMS's, Drupal being the only Open Source one of them. The other two being RedDot by Open Text (a company headquarted locally in Waterloo), and Cascade Server by Hannon Hill.
Later RedDot was selected as the CMS of choice.
However, when the team was sent for training on the the product, they found that it lacks certain things.
So in February 2010, the decision was revisited, and Drupal was selected as the platform of choice for centrally supported web site creation tool within the University of Waterloo!
Here is the full project charter document.
The University of Waterloo joins the nearby University of Guelph who recently chose Drupal as the platform of choice as well.
Over the coming months, we will be hearing directly from members of the respective teams at Waterloo and Guelph about their experience with using Drupal. Watch the Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group for announcements.
Comments
Very interesting news,
Very interesting news, Khalid, thanks for posting this. Perhaps only because of my history but I'd be interested in what the team found lacking in RedDot. Now that I have a full year with Drupal under my belt I have come to think of it as the next-generation of WCM whereas RedDot represents the historical way of doing things. I'd be interested to see what their thinking was.
President & CEO, Global Alliance of Trusted Experts
http://www.gatevillage.net -- South-Western Ontario's Drupal Community Building Site
See charter document
I don't have the full details myself, but last meeting there were 3 people from UW attending. You can ask them about the specifics in future meetings.
What is thrilling about all this is that not only our beloved Drupal won, but it was the only open source contender in the running, and won over a large proprietary product that is locally headquartered.
And what is best, is that they will share what they did and will be doing in future presentations.
The project manager (Eva) will do a future talk about Drupal at UW in general (date to be determined).
Lara will do a presentation in April about Drupal in Science @ UW, which decided to move to Drupal before the big announcement I think.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
Drupal vs. Cascade Server
Yes, very interesting indeed. I know the University of Western Ontario recently chose Cascade Server, but I'm not sure what other options they looked at in their selection process. I'd be interested if we could hear what made them pass over Cascade Server not once but twice.
Odd ...
Well,kind of odd UWO did that.
Drupal has been taking Canadian and US universities by storm. For example U of Windsor, U of Guelph, U PEI, Calgary, McGill, UW, ...etc.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
I'm on maternity leave right
I'm on maternity leave right now so I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing they didn't even look at Cascade again (no budget - they had an agreement to use the Open Text CMS for free).
I was part of the original selection committee so I'm thrilled to hear about this. I tried my best to promote Drupal but there wasn't much of an appetite for it at the time. People really liked the idea of the distributed server models that both Open Text and Cascade had. Cascade is really popular in higher ed for that reason.
Sorry we haven't been able to make it back to another KW Meetup! It's tough to get out with a baby at home :)
Megan McDermott
Woolwich Web Works: Custom Development
It will be great to see this
It will be great to see this project develop. I think a presentation about the selection process comparing their rationale for choosing a FOSS system would be really interesting, especially how as many of us probably think of "FOSS by default" when selecting software.
More information ...
In the March 4, 2010 bulletin of UW Daily News, there is tidbit:
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
Anyone know what the current
Anyone know what the current situation is for the University? Are they still with Drupal?
University of Waterloo
A large portion of the University of Waterloo uses Drupal 7.
According to
According to https://uwaterloo.ca/web-resources/ there are 353 sites on the main WCMS. There are another 40 sites currently in the process of being migrated, and usually another half dozen that are showing some interest in joining in.
I also happen to know that we're talking with the Math Faculty about moving their collection of Drupal sites into our cluster (they're running the same software profile - slightly older - so it should be fairly straight forward).
I have no idea how many sites there are on campus that aren't running Drupal, but we're working on decreasing that number. :-)
Kris, would you have any notes on that?
Wow 6 minute response!
You guys are pretty amazing.
I wish every question posted to a 4 year old post was this fast :).