Drupal Battles Content Management Goliaths at Indias Premier Software Developer Award

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Bangalore, March 11, 2010: Content management technologies first entered the market primarily in the form a separate line-of-business (LOB) application such as a human resources portal or a dealer extranet. They were basically rolled out in response to specific business needs. The technology vendor base was categorised with the key players focusing on a niche within content management, such as document management, Web content management or digital asset management.

Slowly with time and usage, both customer and vendor organisations started realizing the value proposition that content management could bring to the table to address multiple business problems across numerous departments. Thus Enterprise Content Management (ECM) was born, serving as a platform for:

•Building multiple content- and process-centric applications
•Deploying tens to hundreds or even thousands of Web sites and portals
•Supplying content and content services to other enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems
•Facilitating content lifecycle management

With the maturation of the ECM industry, vendors continually added new functionality to their product suites to address the growing variety of content management needs found within corporations worldwide. What began as an industry primarily focused on niche applications has expanded into a market where vendors now offer a full spectrum of content management capabilities, from document management and imaging, digital asset management, and records and retention management, to Web content management and collaboration.

In the 90s, many of us became familiar with browser based content management, by way of GeoCities. Users could create their own personal web pages, maintained from the comfort of their own browsers. No longer bound by the shackles of FTP, GeoCities was a harbinger of user generated social media power, large scale browser based CMSs and communities like MySpace, Linkedin and Facebook.

In the same period, big companies were figuring out that they could delegate content management amongst site stakeholders by building proprietary browser based CMS applications. The “sales department” could maintain the appropriate corner of the corporate website, their HR page, their customer service page etc.

Now, incredible browser content management systems, that (literally) would cost millions to develop, are available for free. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and many are free-of-charge for the clever to customize and use.

The evolution of CMS over the past few years has been rapid and radical. While mid-to-enterprise-level commercial content management systems improved in recent years, they’ve been pushed aside by “the user revolution”.

Saltmarch Media's annual Great Indian Developer Awards honors software products across 12 categories, based on their productivity, innovation excellence, universal usefulness, simplicity, functionality and most importantly on the ground feedback from India’s software developer ecosystem. In the Enterprise Content Management tools category, the final shortlist consists of IBM’s WebSphere Portal, Drupal, Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server, Oracle Universal Content Management, Microsoft’s Content Managem