September 24, 2009

How to Convince Your Boss that Drupal is Better than Proprietary CMS?

In large organizations, convincing your boss or department or project to use Drupal can sometimes be met with resistance. Work at Play has a handy chart for such occasions!

This following table has been instrumental in convincing decision makers regarding why Drupal (and by extension open source) is leaps and bounds better than proprietary content management systems (CMSs).

	Proprietary CMS	Drupal
Cost / Licensing	Costs range from affordable (i.e. $500) to very expensive	Zero software and upgrade acquisition cost . Nothing is proprietary.
Vendors & Development Community	Proprietary CMSs have a department that can work on the website, assuming they are all proficient with it.	There are many thousands of Drupal developers (and companies) around the world.
Business Continuity	If the CMS company ever goes out of business, bought, or the vendor relationship changes, there is a risk of being stuck with a website no one knows how to operate.	If a Drupal company or vendor ever goes out of business or the relationship changes, there are a well qualiﬁed group of others who can take over instantly.
Introducing New Functionality	There are typically a handful of extensions to any proprietary CMS system such as Shopping Cart, Forums, etc. All involve additional licensing and customization costs.	With more than 1,800 available modules, the vast majority of your site’s requirements can be addressed with Drupal CMS and the available add-on modules (in a shorter period time).
Cost of Changes	Many simple changes result in significant costs over time. For core functionality changes, the CMS company is typically the only company that can implement these changes.	The majority of changes can be done automatically through the Drupal CMS by staff. If development is required, bids for the work can be requested by multiple vendors.
Community & User Generated Content (UGC)	UGC Tools seen to date are very simple or lag the market significantly. Communities are challenging to build.	Drupal is a social publishing platform. It was built to support community and UGC out of the box either on the website itself, or integration with third parties like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Awards	Rarely do proprietary CMSs win awards.	Drupal is an award winning Content Management System, having aquired a InfoWorld Bossie Award (making it one of the most popular enterprise open source projects available).