So far, at least 4 sessions will talk about business/enterprise usage of Drupal:
* Drupal as business application platform: http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/node/513
* Building High Traffic and Scalable Business with Drupal: http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/node/582
* "Enterprise" Drupal: http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/node/422
* Creating Applications with Drupal: http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/node/551
How can the speakers coordinate their efforts to maximize the combined yield of these sessions and help us all come out some tangible results? Your ideas are welcome.
There are many topics to explore
My presentation (if it gets picked up) is also like this - I think we should be looking to do a case study approach and help each other and the community understand what is meant by the many parts of enterprise and how such projects fit into the drupal ecosystem-
This understanding needs to gel before seperate issues such as QA, IA, resuse, TCO, ROI, supply chain, acquisitions, development practices and methods, architecture, contracts etc.... can be addressed - IM am glad to see this topic taking shape -
The investment that has been made in learning these lessons (often with a bit of heartache) is a large on that has not proportional visibility or voice in the community to date...
At DrupalCon Sunnyvale, we
At DrupalCon Sunnyvale, we had a panel discussion/debate on the question "Is Drupal an Enterprise Solution?"
I don't think we need to go back to that format, but we should clarify what each session is about. From my end (having made the first proposal), the discussion is basically "How I Learned to Stop My IT Department from Worrying and Finally Adopt Drupal". And I have been planning to abstract the issues that we were faced with so that others can evaluate whether Drupal will work for them.
We should also look at splitting these between DrupalCon and DrupalShow, with different audiences and topics.
The "High Traffic and Scalable" is really a different topic; I've already talked to Michael Meyers about avoiding the same territory.
Perhaps schedule an IRC to discuss?
I just re-read the four
I just re-read the four proposals, and I think that they are all different in obvious ways.
The real overlap seems to be between:
Drupal as business application platform: http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/node/513
Creating Applications with Drupal:
http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/node/551
Both of these seem to be specific case-studies about how specific companies use Drupal to build tools. Again, my intent was is to say: look, whether Drupal is enterprise-ready or not is a settled question. And, in fact, Drupal's competition might not be Joomla. It might be WebSphere or SAP.
Unlike Michael, my focus is on integrating Drupal into existing IT structures. Michael (I believe) will be talking about starting an enterprise with Drupal as a foundational technology.
All that said, I'll be busy enough and may not need to give my talk :-)