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Over the past few months, a few prospects have approached us about a wide range of projects. After reviewing the requirements with the prospects, I have found that Drupal may not be the perfect solution for some projects. Here are a few examples:

1) E-Commerce System with all user data and transaction data situated on external Java Platform
This particular prospect operates a phone based dating service with a web information and payment component. All of their web systems are currently in Java. This includes all billing and user data. Since the user data and billing information integrates with their Java based ERP, none of this data can be ported to Drupal. While Drupal has a robust E-Commerce system, since all of the payment processing must stay on Java, none of that can be used. As a result, Drupal is simply a web content management shell for managing the limited number of pages (7) on their web site. These pages allow users to learn about their service and buy credits (so that they can use the dating phone line). Basically, the idea was to have the user enter their credit card information on the web page, and have that data sent to the Java backend via web service for data processing. All the user login/authentication is done via Java web service. We have determined that this is not a great project for using Drupal and believe that it should be done in custom PHP. The key reason for this is that none of the user system and much of the node system is used for data storage. Drupal is only used for managing a limited amount of content (which rarely changes). The bulk of the system are just web services.

2) File Management System
This prospect would like to have a file sharing/management system for his school. The file management system must allow users to assigning viewing rights to the file and be able to manage the versions of the files. Drupal has a great access right system with version control for node, but the prospect would like to see a file folder structure. While this can be mimicked using Node Hierarchy, we find that it makes more sense to use a full scale file management system such as Alfresco.