OUTDATED: Drupal for professional consultants: typical client requirements

When specifying the requirements of a project most clients ask many of the same questions, whether the project is an ecommerce site or a social network. Listed below are the common concerns of most projects and relevant information available in other parts of this handbook.

Note: Information listed on this page is about a subject not a how-to for that subject, e.g. 'Scalability: Case studies' rather than 'Scalability: How to tune the server'. Some how-to links are being left in for the moment but will be removed in later revisions.

Platform Support

• System requirements

Scalability

• Tuning your server for optimal Drupal performance
• Congestion control: tuning the auto-throttle
• Performance Case Studies
• Any figures available?
• Any good case studies or examples?

Security & Access Control

• Security
• Security announcements
• Configure user registration
• Watchdog: monitor your site
• Any info on history of vulnerabilties and how quickly they where patched?

Administration Overhead

Auditing

• Watchdog: monitor your site

Disaster Recovery

• Backups
• DataBase Administrator

Maintenance

• Upgrade tutorial
• Do we have any info on dates of previous releases? It would be good to be able to give clients a very rough idea of Drupal maintenance cycles

Documentation

• User Guide

Accessibility Legal Compliance

• Accessibility

Professional support

• Drupal services
• People that provide Drupal services
• Consultants mailing list

Interoperability

• NTLM authentication
• LDAP integration
• Pubcookie
• BlogApi
• WebDAV
• OpenID
• Web standards?
• Desktop aplications?
• Microsoft Exchange Server?