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Our office is currently installing an Asterisk based Phone system called TrixBox. Asterisk is a Phone Branching System which allows for corporate phone directories, voice mail systems and other great telecommunication features. Even better is that both of these software systems are also open source.

As I was reviewing the features offered by Asterisk, I did some research into how Asterisk can potentially integrate with Drupal. I learned about this Asterisk-Drupal integration module: http://drupal.org/project/asterisk.

The great thing about Drupal and other open source software is that it is relatively easy to integrate the platform with external software packages. This includes both proprietary software packages and open source packages. With the source code available for review, engineers can easily find ports for integrating open source solutions with other systems.

For Drupal, I find that there has been a great deal of demand in integrating it with the following systems:

1) SalesForce.com: most mid to large size corporations that we work with use SalesForce.com as their CRM solution. Even though SalesForce.com is a hosted application, it has a great API which is well documented. In fact, there is a contributed Drupal module which allows for information be passed between SalesForce.com and Drupal. The module can be found here: http://drupal.org/project/salesforce. We have used an altered version of this module for Drupal and it has been working great.

Over the past year or so, we have been working with a few recording companies, some massive ones and some smaller ones. From working with these companies, we learn that most of them love Drupal because:

1) Drupal supports multi-site: A lot of these recording companies have a large number of artist web sites. In Fact, a bulk of the web development work for these companies tend to involve artist web sites rather than their main portal web site. The Drupal multi-site infrastructure allows for single-sign-on across the various web sites and also allows for the sharing of some modules. All of this represents a lower development and maintenance cost.

2) Drupal is great for social networking features: Over the past 2-3 years, most recording companies have been putting more emphasis on the web promotions aspect of their marketing plan. A big part of this emphasis involves creating an online environment that promotes fans interaction through commenting and discussion forums.

I was at the J.Boye Content Management Conference last week in Philadelphia. It was also great to say hi to Alex and his team over at Zivtech in Philly. The conference was mostly attended by CMS users from bigger companies, mostly in traditional businesses such as finance and pharmaceutical. Most of these companies still focus on using proprietary systems such as Microsoft Sharepoint and Ektron. Seth Gottlieb (who used to work at Optaros) were pretty much the only people with a great deal of Drupal/open source exposure at the conference.

One of the presenters is Wyeth, the pharmaceutical giant and WestJet, the Canadian airline. From speaking with both of the presenters and other conference attendees, I have found that there is a misconception about Drupal: