Over the past few weeks, our friends over at Acquia have been holding a series of Drupal Business Summits in various cities across the United States.  These full-day events are intended to help non-technical business leaders better understand the value of Drupal via real-life success stories.   

We believe strongly in communicating the value and power that open source technologies like Drupal bring to the table, which is why Palantir is proud to be the premier sponsor of the upcoming Chicago Drupal Business Summit, which will be held November 30 at the University of Chicago's Gleacher Center downtown.  

We're really excited about this event, not only because attendees will have the opportunity to hear how Drupal has helped contribute to successful sites we've worked on for organizations such as World Business Chicago and Chicago Public Media, but also because we'll be offering a sneak peek at a very special project that we've been working on for most of the last year.

As part of the case study Tiffany Farriss and Colleen Carroll will be presenting on the work we've been doing with Barnard College to overhaul and migrate their entire Web to Drupal 7, we'll be previewing our work on Workbench, a suite of tools that streamlines content management within Drupal like never before. Workbench enables site administrators to toggle between tabs for content moderation, content creation, granular content management assignments, reusable files and more; all in one simple and intuitive interface.

The new Barnard site will also enable administrators to manage dozens of departmental sites and online course catalog information in a single database using a unified administrative interface, and allow users of varied skill levels to easily update their areas of the site without having to worry about the content management system getting in their way.

I'll also be presenting a session on "Making the Business Case for Drupal and Open Source", which will explore some of the common myths and misconceptions about open source software, the history of Web content management, and the pros and cons of working with custom, proprietary, and open source Web platforms.

And last, but not least, we'll be promoting DrupalCon Chicago! The conference is still a few months away, but registration is already open and we're accepting session proposals through December 10. In particular, we're still looking for some great Business/Strategy track sessions, so if you'd like to share your Drupal business strategy, project management techniques, or best practices knowledge with attendees at DrupalCon Chicago, don't delay!