Drupal vs. IBM Enterprise Content Manager

We developed a corporate website using Drupal, which features a large number of static pages and several dynamic functions, including a contact us form, location finder, and job posting. We utilized Drupal with some customization to achieve the desired functionalities. We have also worked on e-commerce sites using Drupal, and there is a scope for improvements, specifically in cataloging.

Incentivized

Self-hosted IBM ECM Solutions are appropriate for any large organization with substantial internal infrastructure management teams and a commitment to training their staff. Other organizations should consider the Cloud based offerings.

Incentivized

• Content Types... these are amazing. Whereas a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress will basically allow you to make posts and build pages, Drupal 8 gives you the ability to define different types of content that behave differently, and are served up differently in different areas of the website.
• Extensibility... it scales, ohhhh does it scale. They've really figured out server-side caching, and it makes all the difference. Once a page has been cached, it's available instantly to all users worldwide; and when coupled with AWS, global redundancy and localization mean that no matter where you're accessing the site, it always loads fast and crisp.
• Workflows... you have the ability to define very specific roles and/or user-based editorial workflows, allowing for as many touchpoints and reviews between content creation and publication as you'll require.

Incentivized

• Speaking of IBM Case Manager in particular, we believe that just about every business process involving the effort of knowledge workers can be enhanced and automated using IBM Case Manager. If a process or set of tasks requires the judgment, decision-making skills, and experience of a knowledge worker, then the process can be configured for IBM Case Manager. If the process is dynamic and requires flexibility such that the business outcome depends upon the choices and decisions made during the process, then IBM Case Manager is the ideal solution for automation, tracking, and collaboration of such work.
• With regards to Content Management, we are particularly fond of and adept at utilizing both IBM Content Collector, IBM Classification Manager, and IBM Enterprise Records. As business communications have changed over the last 20 years, the growth of digital content housed within the burgeoning storage silos located throughout a company's infrastructure has swelled to nearly unmanageable levels. This impacts them in numerous ways; from the direct costs associated with ever increasing storage, to the unknowable costs associated with the legal liability of content residing on their systems, to the lost opportunity of un-mined customer data residing on their systems. All of these impacts can be mitigated by the application of IBM Content Management and Content Analytics.
• To me personally, I believe the greatest strength of products like these are their immense configurability. Depending upon the business requirements of the customer, systems such as those mentioned above can be configured in almost inexhaustible arrangements to accomplish just about any task that can be imagined - all to satisfy the needs and requirements of the demands of the business. From collecting email from mail servers and evaluating it for its context, not just it's content, in order to determine its worth to the organization, to creating File Plans for storing content in a smart repository which makes possible content lifecycle management and defensible disposal, IBM just does this better than any other products I am familiar with.

Incentivized

• Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
• Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
• Steep learning curve, but worth it

Incentivized

• As enterprise and mid-market systems go, the price is highly competitive (especially when you consider what's included in the license). That said, this product is not accessible for small businesses as a self hosted solution. The "Navigator on Cloud" solution is much more accessible, but gives less control over data.
• To get all the features, there are many moving parts. For large enterprises, this is no problem, and the cloud solution obviates most of these concerns.

Incentivized

I really like Drupal, and besides the one major issue with not being able to update from version 6 to version 7 and I am happy to continuing using it. Hopefully as time goes on they will make it easier to upgrade or provide better tools for mid-level web designers like myself to build out new sites without the help of expensive 3rd party's.

There is no plan to change ECM at organizational level. Replacing products and changing custom applications involves lot of effort

Incentivized

It has a very steep learning curve. When starting with Drupal, the functionality and setup have to be learned, which is complex in comparison to tools like WordPress. Drupal is more powerful and can create a wider range of applications, but it definitely has a learning curve. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to make a dynamic web application bigger than the scale of a WordPress blog.

Incentivized

The end-user experience is excellent. The Administration experience needs some more work.

Incentivized

Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

Incentivized

As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

Incentivized

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

Incentivized

Drupal's capabilities outpace WordPress by miles. Drupal is more customizable, scales better for larger companies and has advanced content types. If you own a small business or work at a startup company, I would recommend WordPress but if your firm is trying to scale and you have more than 50 employees I would recommend Drupal.

Incentivized

Our relationship with IBM is long standing. We have been Gold Partners for some time and are viewed by many internal groups as their Go To partner for large ECM deployments. Most of our systems engineers hold multiple certifications as solutions developers. Our clients are national and international. The support we receive from IBM has been excellent and our partnership with them on numerous projects has been excellent.

Incentivized

Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

Incentivized

• Drupal helped us launch a creative, marketing- and product-focused website with custom coding integrations tailored to our goals.
• Drupal allows us to rely on secure and consistently updated core code.
• Drupal's code taxing on the server does start to get a bit heavy as you go along with customizations, so at some point, we decided to stop. We want to ensure our Google Page Score remains high, including paying close attention to page load speed.

Incentivized

• After using the IBM ECM in HR department the productivity of the department increased
• There are lot of cost savings because of eliminating the need to maintain physical documents

Incentivized