A few weeks ago I blogged that we'd completed the 3 product evaluations we'd scheduled as part of the requirements phase of the Greenpeace UK CMS project (where we scored Planet 2/OpenACS, Plone and Drupal against our top 35 requirements) and that our next steps were to review and interpret the results of the evaluations, consider our non-functional requirements, make our product/vendor decision and plan the next phases of the project. Although we don't have all the information we need to make our final business case to the Greenpeace UK senior management team quite yet, we have made a provisional decision — budget permitting, we're going with Drupal.
It's been an extremely tough decision to make because there are very real advantages (and disadvantages) to each of the products we've considered. And all the people we've interacted with throughout the process we've followed have been so friendly and helpful and passionate which makes even announcing this difficult, but in the end, given our specific requirements and situation, we've decided that Drupal makes the most sense.
For anyone who may be interested, here's the spreadsheet we used to perform our evaluations:
Greenpeace UK CMS Feature Evaluations (98 KB). (And if you're really interested, I'm happy to take a crack at answering any questions you may have as you take a look through our scores and wonder why one product did better than another here-but-not-there, etc.)
Our next steps are to define the scope of work for the next phases of the project as best we can, send out our RFP to the shortlist of Drupal vendors we've identified, make a vendor decision, and present our final business case to the budget approvers at Greenpeace UK.
Onwards!
projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, nptech, importantprojects, greenpeace, productevaluation, drupal, open source, cms
Congrats to your choice. It will be extremely interesesting to see what you come up with, especially since being one of Greepeace bigger (biggest?) webbteams.
So your are not doing the development on Drupal "in house"?
Posted by: Anders at June 3, 2006 12:44 PMHi, Anders!
Thanks for your comment. Although Greenpeace UK is one of the bigger Greenpeace NROs (National Regional Offices), their web team isn't huge (4 full time people), and they spend most of their time keeping the site updated. The plan is to work with a Drupal vendor initially and for hosting long term, but to train the Greenpeace UK web team so they can manage the site themselves (i.e. add modules, etc.).
Stay tuned :)
Rob
Posted by: Rob at June 3, 2006 12:51 PMThe selection chart is interesting, but could you explain item 00077 "be able to reuse/leverage content from other GP sites on the GP UK site" : the difference in score between Planet2 and both Plone and Drupal is huge, and I know that Drupal (and quite probably Plone too) allow that kind of data sharing between sites on different servers.
Posted by: FGM at June 5, 2006 10:39 AMHi, Frederic!
Requirement 00077 was written with Planet 2 in mind (and was an unfair requirement in that respect) — Greenpeace International hosts Planet 2 for the 20 Greenpeace offices using it; these offices can browse all content posted by all other Greenpeace offices using Planet 2 and "clone" it for use/display on their own Greenpeace/Planet 2 site. So it's more than RSS aggregation, and an amazing feature for Greenpeace offices using Planet 2.
Rob,
I think that for both Plone and Drupal (and I imagine Planet2) that your feedback is enormously valuable. Thank you so much for going through this process out in the open so that these projects can understand what a third party thinks about the projects.
It would be very beneficial if you could go into more detail on the features missing in the areas where you gave the projects a lower score.
For Drupal, I outlined the items where the score was either lower than an A- or lower than the other systems here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/458#comment-1605
I also made some guesses as to why I thought you ranked them the way you did or what I thought you might have overlooked that could sway your decision another way.
Perhaps you could take a look at the list and provide your input?
If you prefer to contact me directly - you have my email on this comment.
Thanks again and best regards,
Greg
Thanks, Greg, and I'd be happy to do this (i.e. to the extent that I can — the scores in our feature evaluation spreadsheet are averages) — give me a day or so :)
Rob
Posted by: Rob at June 5, 2006 05:55 PMthanks for doing this "in public" - it is really useful.
Posted by: nancy white at June 6, 2006 09:33 PMMy pleasure, Nancy :)
Posted by: Rob at June 8, 2006 09:04 AM@greggles - I've responded to your post at http://groups.drupal.org/node/458#comment-1691. Not sure how helpful my comments are - please let me know if additional information would be of value.
Posted by: Rob at June 8, 2006 10:05 AM
