Byrne Tony Byrne

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Is Drupal Over-hyped?

11-Jun-2009

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Web Content Management, Information Architecture, Selecting Technology, Alfresco WCM, Drupal Commons

I'll disagree with Gartner as frequently as the next person, but their Hype Cycle is surely genius -- the way it captures such phases as "trough of disillusion" and "slope of enlightenment." The hype cycle comes to mind with many of the technologies and vendors we cover.

Lately, I've been wondering about whether Drupal isn't entering the "peak of inflated expectations." Why? Well, an example: I've run into two different people in recent weeks who had never seen or touched Drupal, yet eagerly extolled its virtues to me. More commonly, you'll hear an off-hand, "why don't we just use Drupal?" The way some people say, "Why don't we just use SharePoint?"

We cover Drupal in both our Web CMS and Enterprise Social Software & Collaboration research. Drupal has as many strengths and weaknesses as its main competitors in those marketplaces. What's interesting about the platform is that it straddles both use-cases, though not always easily.

To be sure, Drupal has gotten a lot of street-buzz recently, much of it well-earned. But it is not the knight in shining armor that many hope, and sometimes I think that with Drupal -- like Alfresco -- integrators and consulting partners are more enthusiastic about the package than actual customers. In these pages, we've detailed Drupal's module confusion, frequent vulnerability disclosures, and the same customer flame-outs that other packages experience. In other words, Drupal shares many of the shortcomings of other software tools.

We frequently counsel customers not to default to SharePoint (or Google, Oracle, IBM, et. al.) just because there's a lot of awareness of that package in the marketplace. Awareness is a marketing concept that cannot convey how a product will fit for you, architecturally, functionally, and financially. In this connection it doesn't matter that Drupal is open source; hype is hype. So sure, look into Drupal, but then have some good reasons for picking it against its many alternatives.

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