The Drupal-based solution, delivered in just nine business days, not only replaced the custom application, it provided significantly enhanced functionality:

• Rich-text WYSIWYG editing capability, allowing employees creating “best practice” postings to put more content directly into pages and avoid unnecessary attachments, all without knowing complicated markup languages
• Threaded commenting (forums) on best practice documents, where the previous system had allowed only a 1-5 star rating with no additional comments
• Content management functionality for administrators to add FAQs, guidance on acceptable formats, and centralized messages to all users
• The ability for users to flag content as inappropriate for review by administrators and potential removal
• Tag-based “Folksonomy” in addition to traditional, pre-determined categorization
• RSS feeds per topic, per tag, and per user—the existing application had only provided email notification
  

Additionally, the solution aggregates external RSS feeds (competitive intelligence, market news, and the like) identified by site administrators, enabling them to re-syndicate feeds internally without  end users needing to have or understand an RSS reader.

Because the developer community around the Drupal project is large and diverse, there are hundreds, even thousands of modules available which can be quickly and easily added to a Drupal instance. For example, free-form tagging capability that allows folksonomy-based navigation was provided by the “Tagadelic” module. By leveraging the Drupal framework and community- contributed modules, Optaros was able to deliver a solution which exactly met the customer’s needs, but will also provide long-term flexibility as those needs evolve.