Drupal Commons offers open source sociability for enterprises

The home page on the Drupal Commons demonstration site.

Acquia have announced Drupal Commons 1.0, an open source social networking tool for enterprises. Drupal Commons is a complete system for fast deployment of a fully functional social networking site, either as part of a company's internal infrastructure, or as part of an externally facing community site.

Acquia sees Drupal Commons as open source competition with proprietary solutions which have been offered in the same sector. It offers the typical social network features; signing up as a member and creating profiles, forming, joining and administering groups, forum discussions, wikis and group blogs and scheduling. It can also be integrated with a companies CRM or LDAP system and the system has integrated analytics for measuring user activity on the system.

Drupal Commons was created by Acquia after finding that enterprises often wanted a complete solution, ready for intergration, and found that "In some cases, Drupal is too much of a framework".

Drupal Commons can be experienced on Acquia's demonstration site at commons.acquia.com which also acts as a community site for Drupal Commons. The GPL2 licensed code, currently available as a 14MB compressed tar file (direct download link), will eventually be hosted on Drupal.org, but, Dries Buytaert creator of Drupal and CTO of Acquia, in a comment on the announcement said that "drupal.org needs a bit more work before it can support a distribution like Drupal Commons" and that the company is working on the issue.

(djwm)