Business and Best Practices

oxfam-plus-drupal-equals-great-082311.pdf

Oxfam is an international confederation of 15 organizations working together in 98 countries to find lasting solutions to poverty and injustice. Since they need to communicate quickly and richly with their staff, partners, and allies across the world, they turned to Drupal as a framework to help build and power many of their public and private websites. This presentation will focus on how Oxfam is adopting Drupal as an organization to meet its unique goals and will highlight, through case examples, how Drupal is used to power Oxfam's public website (oxfam.org) and their global intranet (sumus.oxfam.org).

Intended audience

This session is focused on those interested in how an NGO like Oxfam uses Drupal to power important websites and general Drupal developers and site builders looking for new techniques to create collaborative and social websites.

Questions answered by this session

How does an NGO like Oxfam use Drupal?

What techniques can I use to foster collaboration on my Drupal websites?

How can Drupal be used as a global communication platform?

How do I build rich features for my internal users?

How do I design and build a site for a globally diverse set of users?

For people interested in big websites and their unique challenges, this panel offers a behind the scenes look at The Economist site. A team of experienced Economist developers will talk about the complicated challenges, the innovative solutions, and the still-to-be-solved issues of this popular website. There will also be a (lively, no doubt) Q&A.

Intended audience

Developers and business people interested in the technical aspect of The Economist website and the big-website solutions the team has developed.

Questions answered by this session

How does The Economist handle workflow and quality control?

How does The Economist handle testing?

What performance solutions has The Economist developed?

What aspects of The Economist site are custom-coded in innovative ways?

What's the status on The Economist migration to Drupal?

Drupal products - Drupalcon v2.pdf

Every day more and more companies start using Drupal and the day will come when it'll make all the difference if you are more than just-another-Drupal-shop.

Drupal is a very innovative community, and we've got a wide range of companies and individuals that are constantly pioneering new technologies. For several of these pioneers this is a conscious differentiation strategy, an attempt to increase personal or company karma. Commercially however this innovation has not always been particularly successful.

Intended audience

Business owners, consultants

Questions answered by this session

What is customer development

What is a lean startup

What is business model generation

How could we make an ethical Drupal appstore

What is wrong with alpha and beta release mentality

why-drupal-projects-fail.pdf

Drupal is a flexible, feature rich web application platform that many thriving companies leverage as their cornerstone technology. Why, then, do some companies fail horribly when adopting Drupal? Are you having trouble meeting deadlines? Are your developers pounding their keyboards claiming that Drupal is garbage? Are your project managers running for the hills? If so, this session will identify common barriers that companies experience when first adopting Drupal and provide solutions on how to overcome them.

Intended audience

This presentation is intended for business owners, project managers, technical leads / architects, and sales managers. There will be little technical discussion other than high level concepts, as most of the reasons why Drupal projects fail have little to do with the low level technology.

Questions answered by this session

Why are my Drupal projects failing when so many other organizations are having success?

What are the common barriers that other companies are experiencing?

How have other organizations broken through those barriers?

How can I set my project up for success?

What can I do to set my development / design up for success with Drupal?

Drupal is a growing and maturing industry. The typical Drupal business is no longer just a small sole proprietor, trying to make ends meet. There is now a wide range of businesses working with Drupal, from well established large integrators, to well funded venture-backed startups seeking to revolutionize the way websites are built. Mergers and acquisitions in such a landscape are to be expected, and recent history shows that consolidation is already happening.

Intended audience

The intended audience for this session are Drupal shops (small & big ones), business leaders, Drupal experts, project owners, business evaluators, strategy planners, business consultants, & Drupal start-up companies

Questions answered by this session

Which successful examples exist and what are the motives behind Drupal Mergers & Acquisitions?

How can I profit from a Merger, Acquisition or Acq-Hire?

How Drupal companies benefit from economies of scale?

How to create synergy through mergers/acquisition or alliances that makes the value of the combined companies greater than the sum of the two parts?

When is the right time to merge, acquire or form an alliance?

We now live in a world of Drupal products. The first "app store" was announced and launched, and more companies than ever are building (or want to be building) Drupal products. It's time to take a look and see what's working, and why. Who is succeeding with Drupal products, and what should newcomers to the market know and pay attention to for their products to succeed?

We'll be asking hard questions:

• What products are doing well?
• What ingredients make them succeed?
• How does the GPL help us? Does it hold us back?

Intended audience

C Types, business minded developers, analysts, and decisions makers of all stripes.

Questions answered by this session

What products are doing well?

What ingredients make them succeed?

How does the GPL help us? Does it hold us back?

Are distributions and app stores the future of Drupal products?

What APIs and technology platforms are important?

DrupalCon London 2011 -- Aegir Based Business Models.pdf

Aegir is a distributed provisioning system for Drupal that allows you to manage thousands of sites across as many concurrent instances of Drupal on as many servers as you need. At Koumbit Networks, a lead development shop behind the Aegir project, we are developing or already have in place several distinct business models, largely enabled by our Aegir infrastructure and expertise.

Intended audience

Anyone building a business on Drupal: Freelancers, Business owners, Drupal developers, site builders, system administrators

Questions answered by this session

What is Aegir, and how can it ease my dev/test/staging/prod workflow?

What is SaaS, and how does it allow me to leverage my existing Drupal portfolio?

What is IaaS, and how do Aegir .deb's make it possible?

What is PaaS, and what interesting reseller opportunities might it open up?

Sumit Chicago Presentation Mobile apps and Drupal stripped.pdf

Well no need to explain why mobile apps are important! At present you can't really ignore the iOS and Android platforms. Both these technologies have great potential to use our existing web based tools such as Drupal. You can totally use Drupal to manage your iPhone/Android native apps data in cloud.

A sequel to DrupalCon Chicago's and DrupalCon CPH's "Developing Apps for iPhone/iPad/Android using Drupal as Base System" session (more advanced!! more fun!!)

Intended audience

Beginner, iPhone iPad Android app developers, Coders, Curious

Questions answered by this session

Why to use Drupal (in cloud) as base system for your mobile app?

How to use Drupal as base system to manage your mobile application's data (photos, videos, content, users, geo data, taxonomies etc etc)?

How to quickly develop mobile app platforms using Drupal?

How to be an iPhone rockstar without knowing Objective C?

What it means "Titanium with RedHat Openshift and Drupal"??

So what's it like to manage a huge Drupal project with over 100 people on the team, a multi million pound project budget, and demanding clients?

Colin Sweetman and Al Croston of Axis12 Limited will talk about the lessons they've learned about building and structuring big Drupal teams, scaling Agile and keeping Stakeholders happy.

This isn't deeply technical, but is aimed at explaining how you can scale a Drupal project, use virtual teams, work with agility and still meet customer expectations when they come from a waterfall world.

Intended audience

senior developers, project managers, organisations running large Drupal sites, team leaders.

Questions answered by this session

How do I scale a Drupal team for an enterprise project?

How can I keep agility and provide a waterfall wrapper for the customer?

hiring - how to find the superstars

building team cohesion

Selling Drupal to nervous clients

Drupal_On_a_Dime_DRAFT.pdf

You already know Drupal is capable of doing almost anything... for a price. But what about those looking to leverage Drupal on a tight budget and timeline? Is it possible to build a kick-butt site on a dime and deploy it at warp speed without sacrificing quality? (i.e. “Can I have my cake and eat it too?”)

The goals of this session are threefold:

1. We will debunk some of the common myths about Drupal design and development. For example, we’ll debunk the idea that custom built is always better.

Intended audience

This session is intended for people who are planning a project using Drupal and are looking for cost and time saving strategies.

Questions answered by this session

How can we make the most out of Drupal’s functionality on a small budget?

What are some strategies and best practices for selecting features?

When is it wrong (and possibly unnecessary) to pay for custom development?

What can I do to get the most value from a web designer?

Low-price, high-quality, fast. I’ve heard you can only pick two, is that true?