On boxesandarrows.com you can find a good article about the use of patterns for the user interface. The staff of Yahoo! wanted to make sure that reinventing the wheel regarding the best user interface within Yahoo! would stop by facilitating the designers with some sort of a “knowledge blog”.

In this blog they could post their ideas, standards, rank them and hence create a more consistency, predictability userinterface across the Yahoo! sites. They describe in depth how the process from their functional requirements towards implementation went and how they made sure everybody would join in and use the tool. Yahoo considered different technologies (Blog applications, CMSs, Groupware and Wikis) and implementations (Movable Type, pMachine, PHPNuke, PHPCollab, Tikiwiki and yes: Drupal).

And after they ranked all techniques and implementations, Yahoo! choose for drupal: "Ultimately, we chose Drupal because of its breadth of capabilities, powerful taxonomy, and extensibility"

The article features some nice workflow charts and screenshots. It is nice to see that a big search engine like Yahoo! is using Drupal internally.

Lets hope more companies will follow, especially from the non-ICT sector and that they will find out or know that giving their own modules back to the community, will benefit all

Comments

bertboerland’s picture

first announcement on radio and some insight on bryght
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groets
bertb

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groets
bert boerland

maptheway’s picture

Even before I met with Jot, I'd gotten excited about wikis - web sites that anyone can edit, update, or extend. We used an open source variant at Yahoo!, and it really changed the way we collaborated around projects. So many of those static HTML pages or emailed Word and Excel documents could be replaced by the wiki. The product, engineering and project managers jumped for joy. But there were some hiccups - the product we used was way too confusing. It's great for people who think HTML is "trivial," but for everyone else it was frustratingly complex. As one of my friends in business development said, "every time I click 'edit' I feel like I've broken something." As a result, many product managers and engineers latched onto it but we had challenges getting others to use it. The desperate plea of "can you guys please just put that in the wiki?" became all too common (it was usually greeted with the reply "ugh, I'll just email it to you"). Furthermore, it's great that Yahoo! has lots of engineers and spare FreeBSD and Linux boxen lying around, and all that experience configuring LAMP environments. It turns out most companies don't have those resources or expertise, especially the smaller ones. And even if they have that talent, shouldn't they be busy helping their companies win in the marketplace, not configuring internal software? There had to be an easier way.

JotSpot also pushed some of my hot buttons around collaboration and community. I've spent the better part of my career building applications that help people connect to each other and share knowledge (search is the best example of that). http://heynorton.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/a_yahoo_no_more.html

kennethn’s picture

Yahoo! uses a different open source wiki variant pretty extensively throughout the company. That's the one I was referring to in my blog post. I don't want to name it because I've nothing against it per se, I think pretty much all of the open source software products suffer from the same deficiencies.

I admit to being ignorant of Drupal, but apparently some folks in the user experience and design group at Yahoo! are using it.

Ken Norton
http://heynorton.typepad.com

gkanski’s picture

I read on tWiki.org website that Yahoo was using its system (http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/TWikiSuccessStoryOfYahoo).
Great system btw.

Grzegorz Kanski

benc’s picture

Thought I'd share this with you: Why Choose Drupal?

rcross’s picture