Drupal has been around a long time in web years as a community platform. I first heard about it in 2004. Acquia was recently formed to make Drupal more accessible and provide professional support. I covered it first in 2008 (see Acquia Makes Drupal Community Building Accessible) and then again earlier this year (see Acquia Grows with Drupal and Introduces Drupal Gardens).

Acquia has several offerings. First, they offer Drupal support. They also offer Drupal hosting so you can have one stop support for all Drupal needs.  In addition, there are enhanced functionality through Acquia Network for such capabilities as enhanced search with facets, weighting, and related content.  There is also Drupal Gardens, a SaaS-based tool that allows you to quickly and easily build a Drupal website.

Now there is Drupal Commons. I recently spoke with Jay Batson, Acquia co-founder about this latest offering. It is an open source social software solution built on top of Drupal to provide an alternative to the many proprietary platforms on the market. Jay said that a number organizations have already built complex Drupal community sites such as Symantec, as shown below.

Taking a wisdom of customers approach, Acquia has looked at the common features across these custom-built sites and selected the set of functionality to offer in Drupal Commons. This includes both content management and social software features. Drupal Commons provides these capabilities in an “off-the–shelf” mode that previously required custom development. Since it is open source you can do any further customization, an option often lacking in proprietary platforms.

There are four components: content and collaboration, people and relationships, personalization, and community management with analytics.  The content management functions offers: configurable content types, tagging and pre-defined vocabularies, rich media content support, faceted search, automated recommendations and featured content.  The people part has: custom roles and permissions, configurable user profiles, self-organizing and managed groups, discussion forums, ratings, activity streams, and a micro-blogging capability.

The personalization capabilities are shown above include: dashboards, social bookmarking, curated content, and ability to subscribe to content and discussions. The analytics tracks: users, content, comments, groups and variable date ranges. See sample screen below.

Drupal Commons can integrate with other tools such as Salesforce.com, SharePoint, Web-based training, and many other applications and SaaS services. Acquia partners with large system integrators, developers and social business strategy firms to support their clients.

Drupal Commons is free and Acquia then provides support and hosting on a commercial basis.  It is great to see an open source alternative to the many proprietary offerings in this space.  I expect that they will get a strong reception in the market.