By pscheimann on

I am checking the use of Drupal for the specific conditions:

1 the company that has offices in several places in the world
2 they would like to have a system (database and server) that would manage the various sites (corporate + subsidiaries + distributors) that would display the information in various languages ( english, french, german, chinese, japanese and more)
3 possibility to use existing templates in order to create pages for non experts
4 possibility to create templates
5 possibility to have common content for each websites on their home page
6 possibility to let local people (e.g. subsidiaries) update a specific frame on the home page and pages
7 Translation mechanism -possibility to use many different languages, upload the translations in the right location, and have notifications

Weblogs, wikis and community services are not yet in their requirements but I am sure it will be so that Drupal would be of good use.

Last, I would really need some help with the installation - I have tried several months ago and had to give up: I am not techi enough to play with the php files. You can contact me personally (mailto:ps@orayala.com )

Comments

garym@teledyn.com’s picture

garym@teledyn.com commented

I am wary of any project what seeks to make Drupal what it is not, for forgive my answering this with a qualified 'yes' -- in my experience rolling out Drupal for business uses, where people are not really interested in the blogging and social-software aspects of Drupal, they tend to be very disappointed, progressively asking for changes to the CMS until what they would have is no longer Drupal.

Drupal, IMHO, excels as a community communications system; it is a CMS by necessity, but that is not it's primary strength. For a first example, in your specifications above, you mention local sites having access to add content to a region of an otherwise internationally-determined front page; in Drupal, you would give each local site their stories and blogs and end up using the static page (like the advertising-like intro on the drupal.org front page) as the corporate content, and that's probably not satisfying because the tools for maintaining that static content are only a single form editor. You can fudge this by having the central office send out the static page to be installed into each regional site either by hand or by remote posts to their database, but you've stepped outside of what Drupal does.

On the other hand, if you could turn this inside out to a site where the local affiliates produce their central-column content in a running blog-like stream of releases, paged as Drupal does, and then place the international headlines into a sidebar summary and on the international hub have those headline stories in the central column with the various international affiliates summarized in sidebars or on an affiliate aggregator page, then you're talking Drupal's language.

Or, let's say you give each principle employee (or dept) a blogging space and let your visitors interact with the content and the writers ... that, in my estimation, is a far better use of Drupal and a far better use of your web budget.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

I think that subsites based on some elaborate database sharing will be a good way to implement departments and such.
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pscheimann’s picture

pscheimann commented

Gary,

thanks for your detailed answer.
It is clear to me that the people are not yet ready for all the social aspects that Drupal is providing but this will surely come quickly and thus I want to be ready for it.

Indeed, since the local affiliates need to produce some content, this may very well be done with a blog-like stream of releases as you are explaining.
Using blogs for press releases could be a first application.

One important issue for the corporate people is to be able to maintain the websites without having to go through a technical third party.
Is this possible?

There is one issue that I have raised and I am not sure your answer says yes or no:
apart from providing content through a blog type, I would like to provide people with
- tools to build their own webpage based upon given templates
- tools to build templates.

Is this possible through drupal or do I have to give them a software like dreamweaver/frontpage/or whatever.

On the other hand, is there any alternative to Drupal for this kind of project?