Microsoft blows kisses at Drupal

Adub has been approached by Microsoft with an interesting proposition - finding ways to integrate parts of the Microsoft stack with Drupal.

This may seem a little strange at first given Microsoft's well-known historical opposition to open source software. But I believe this makes a lot of sense as online applications have become a main business driver for many existing and potential MS customers. To put it plainly, if their platform can't operate well with standard applications such as Drupal, they will lose many of these customers to companies like Redhat and Oracle.

Drupal is particularly well-suited here as one of its great strengths is as an integration framework and it has historically aimed to be general-purpose and focussed on utility. I think it's fair to say that Drupal developers want to put as much power in the hands of users as possible. Developing better integration with Microsoft tech can be a great win for Drupal as it expands its reach into Microsoft data silos and allows many new customers to work with Drupal development shops without the need to throw away their existing investments.

About the project

This is an early step for Microsoft and so they decided to sponsor a very small London-based project with a number of developers. A part of Drupal's culture has been to work with charities and NGO's, enabling them to achieve their goals at minimum cost and with a minimum requirement for in-house technical expertise. So it was decided to develop functionality to help smaller charity sector clients get up and running with fundraising activities.

We are currently in the post-planning, pre-development stage. Mori Sugimoto has outlined the project in more detail. We expect to deliver the following modules:

• Fundraising module
• Drupal-Silverlight integration
• Drupal-MSN Messenger integration
• Email newsletter to stay in touch with donors

The following people are involved:

• Adub - Django Beatty
• Code Positive - Robert Castelo
• Diasporan.net - Mori Sugimoto 
• Homemade Digital - Martin Gill, Ben Alexander, Benedict Steele
• Natts.com - David Nattriss

Most team members are working independently and different members have different commitments so we are using a loose Scrum-based method of project management with Basecamp, email and a weekly telephone conference as points of coordination. (We could have used OpenAtrium here but a Basecamp account had been donated and as an agile team we didn't want to get bogged down in process.)

Part two - Modules, modules, modules