Drupal Commons: Overview, Features and Uses

All businesses are constantly searching for better and integrated ways to reach a wider audience. While Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ are social media leaders offering a great reach to your customers who are already there, they don’t let you fully manage the community data. Having no access to your community’s back-end data makes the analysis of this data less efficient. Many companies have met this challenge by creating their own community on Drupal Commons. The major advantage of social business communities is their facility in terms of customer support. Forums and FAQs help users with support issues, training and education. Many companies build also industry focused communities for marketing and sales purposes. Such approach enables much easier and productive interaction between the company and its customers in data-driven environment making companies social enterprises. According to Forrester, Drupal Commons is one of the leading platforms for building scalable social communities nowadays. Drupal Commons Overview Drupal Commons is Acquia’s open-source Drupal-powered platform for development of web social communities. Drupal 7 along with a wide library of carefully chosen modules and tools in Drupal Commons help users create out of the box projects for enhancing corporate presence and improving user communication. The platform maintains flexibility and Drupal customization allowing companies make their communities fit unique business needs eliminating the common constraints of commercial software. Drupal Commons Features: Advanced analytics Comprehensive development tools Extensive APIs Integration with different software Large development ecosystem Multiple customization opportunities Open source Totally flexible design 20,000 contributing engineers One of the most functional features of Drupal Commons giving it significant advantage over competitors is its integration ability with other software. This feature is of high demand for many modern businesses. While Jira and some other platforms also provide integration, it often proves quite expensive and far from seamless whereas Drupal Commons allows for multiple integration points and seamless data communication. Drupal Commons Uses: Community forum Corporate/social intranet Customer support community Discussion board Private community Among the social media sites which are powered by Drupal Commons are Twitter, Ebay, World Economic Forum and others.