Douglas & I attended the very first Drupal Business Day in Singapore and it was certainly a very interesting, eye-opening experience, especially when it came to meeting Chris Harrop (APAC Regional Director), David Perterson (Senior Drupal Advisor) and Tine Sørensen (Technical Account Manager) from Acquia.
Drupal Business Day is aimed at business individuals to help them understand the changes in the web today and how many leading organisations are embracing Open Source technology, and of course, how Drupal helps companies to achieve their digital strategy goals. The location was kindly sponsored by NUS Enterprise, who also sponsored our venue for PuppetCamp Singapore last year.
The guys at Pixel Onion did a great job of organising, and they even came up with this awesome 'Introduction to Drupal' video. Kudos to Kiat and SJ!
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Keynote: Drupal, Your Web Experience Management Platform
Chris Harrop kickstarted the day for all of us by telling us what Drupal is as a Web Experience Management (WEM) platform and how Acquia as well as the Drupal community can support us when we decide to embark on Drupal.
Chris explained how Drupal is more than just a Content Management System (CMS). It encompasses everything you want to include in a website: content, community and commerce, which makes it a WEM platform because the flexibility of Drupal allows you to do exactly what you want.
He also gave some good insights into why companies should turn to Open Source software, especially for WEM as not only is it free and cost-effective, but the speed of innovation, support from the global community, open APIs and connectivity make it a great option for businesses.
Case Studies on Using Drupal
Managing Your Web Content with Drupal
Maven Lab showed us a very interesting case study on how they used Drupal for Singapore Press Holdings' various websites and apps, like the Straits Times, HerWorld and Stomp websites, and how it has been working very well for them.
They also gave a very good insight on why a web-based CMS is great for businesses and showed us the various proprietary as well as Open Source CMSes available today.
Managing A Community with Drupal
Red Airship introduced the idea of managing a community using Drupal, the way they had done for Angel's Gate, which included a custom-built crowdfunding platform.
Their "5 tips to efficiently build & manage an online community" gave everyone an overview on how we can allow managers to have different responsibilities, manage spammers, measure business metrics, increase virality of content and target user engagement with a synchonised mailing list, all with the use of Drupal.
Managing Your Commerce with Drupal
Club Vivre showed us how they are using Drupal to help with their e-commerce as they are running an online shop for private dining experiences with top chefs.
Club Vivre wanted an all-inclusive platform to fit their business requirements of having a booking/selling platform, social media marketing & integration and performance analytics, and possibly user & community management in the future. Explaining how they considered various other platforms, they found that Drupal allowed the scalability, design and speed to value that they wanted and they are still currently improving their shop as they learn more about Drupal.