Posted by Branjawn on September 9, 2010 at 2:19pm
I have friends in geeky places, like the Information Systems Department at the NCGA (our legislature) and I've been working them for a while now on switching to Drupal.
1) I want to know if no one cares or if others would like to help me in convincing them to move to Drupal.
2) Their main hesitation is that they use almost all Microsoft stuff and aren't sure of Drupal's compatibility.
If you would be interested in helping me on this campaign, please let me know, especially you that work for government entities (e.g. public institutions of higher learning).
I'll get some more details and post as comments as they become available.
Comments
What's your end-game here?
If the state legislature web services are running in a predominantly Microsoft environment I question the wisdom in pressuring them to switch to Drupal. While D7 will offer support for MSSQL (for example) there are still nontrivial issues with getting Drupal running in a purely MS environment, especially if they're using IIS to host.
This being the case I have to ask what's your agenda for trying to push State IS departments into moving to Drupal? I certainly hope this isn't some kind of attempt on your part to line up contracting/consulting work...
hahaha
No, I used to work there, don't plan on going back. They were just asking about Drupal (i still play poker and softball with a few of the guys) and I was sharing with them my limited knowledge and they wanted to know more. They are interested in getting away from the high dollar proprietary stuff they use now and pay dearly for. Well, as a taxpayer, I should say WE pay for.
MS SQL Server and Active Directory are two things they would want Drupal to integrate with.
Although, a few of them are questioning whether they should look into switching to a LAMP stack altogether.
Is the legislature any
Is the legislature any different from the rest of state govn't in terms of functioning bureaucracy? I have some experience with NC gov't IT, and the folks doing the actual work have little to no say over what technologies are actually used. That decision comes from the clueless departmental managers who get wined and dined by the corporations fishing for high-dollar gov't contracts.
and php
and they are looking into php as well. they still use perl (.pl files) which is what they used back when I was there 10 years ago.
There is already quite a bit
There is already quite a bit of Drupal in highered throughout NC. I will be glad to connect your friends with some of us in that world if it helps and they have questions. Sheena is right on with the bureaucracy. I certainly see that sometimes. Luckily, University's are somewhat decentralized due to academic and programmatic needs differing so much between areas.
Drupal + Microsoft
I was at Drupalcon SF and Drupalcon Copenhagen. Microsoft was a significant sponsor at both events. Microsoft's commitment to drupal is increasing, there is some collaboration taking place at some pretty high levels.
If this is a serious idea, I could bend the ear of some people at Acquia (we're acquia partners). They're pretty serious about supporting government initiatives, and have been working with microsoft as well.
We could put a meeting together between NC legislature and some drupal people to talk about feasibility for sure.
(and we do some work for higher education, both in NC and in other states as well)
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www.bluesparklabs.com
WebPI
Riversedge: it is noteworthy that the Microsoft's WebPI includes Drupal (the Acquia distribution) as one of the CMS's it can install (I've always seen it listed first, anecdotally)
The problem with MS support for FLOSS initiatives (informally seems to be a common lament by MS developers) is that they can as arbitrarily pull support as they added it and poof; game over.
I'd love for any state agency to move away from commercially-licensed software for numerous reasons but I also have no doubt that the tail wags that dog.
Good topic
I've summarized your comments and sent forth to the Web Manager and Web Master at the NCGA. Thanks everyone.
FWIW - Drupal != LAMP
One thing to point out is that Drupal isn't really tightly tied to the LAMP world. Our IT folks here are MS centric (for some good reasons). So we run Drupal in a WAMP environment (Windows OS, Apache Server, MySQL, PhP) and haven't found any real show stoppers. Even Drush works fine (need to install Cygwin). The one major thing we'd looked at that doesn't work in WAMP is Aegir...
I do second Allen in that WIMP (Windows IIS, MySQL, PhP) is aptly named.. and to stay way from that.
The biggest hurdles for our IT folks in using Apache's HTTPD was that SSL and Virtual host set up is more complex than IIS's GUI tools. Plus, we needed to define a good security update policy. E.g. someone monitor's the Apache announcement list and coordinates the code updates... rather than automatic Windows updates. But since HTTPD is very stable and mature security updates are not that frequent.
We did hit a little bit of resistance with MySQL over MS SQL Server. Mostly over the lack of a backup plug-in. But once we dug into it, we found that MySQL had lots of other ways to match MS SQL's features that in someways were simpler and easier than SQL Server. Plus being able to point to sites like Google that depend on it and the cost difference doesn't hurt. Also make sure to show people the various MySQL GUI Tools for DB management. These are getting close to the same tools that SQL Server has for management.
Finally, if they want to authenticate against Active Directory, I believe that there's an LDAP Authentication module that will work against AD. I haven't played with this but I have done something similar with getting Tomcat's LDAP authenticator to work with our AD.... the principles are the same.
Oh... and don't forget to mention that Whitehouse.gov is a Drupal site.