Today, platform upgrades are coming in full versions every 12 to 18 months. How do organizations of any type manage this constantly evolving web world? This is a question that often comes up for many people and it's hard to understand what the value of continually upgrading that can sometimes result in a rewrite of custom functionality is.

Today's keynote presentation was about developing and designing with mobile in mind first. Review of the statistics makes it very clear that we are trending toward an entire generation of people/professionals who will never utilize what we would call the "personal computer". What I found interesting was that the largest area of expected for growth is actually in mobile web as opposed to native applications. Great examples of this are echoed by some of the largest consumer companies in the world, such as Southwest, Facebook, Flickr, Expedia, and many more.

During day two of DrupalCon, I attended several sessions that discussed how Drupal is being leveraged by larger organizations and the challenges that the Drupal community at large faces in enterprise-level adoption. One session in particular, “Competing with Giants: How to Win with Drupal vs. Proprietary Alternatives” by Bryan House, discussed the benefits Drupal delivers to the business/marketing and IT stakeholders of a large organization.

Today I attended a track very focused on eCommerce as Drupal traditionally has not carved out a niche in the eRetail market. I was particularly interested as we are a Magento Silver partner and while we've done some terrific work on the Drupal platform for eCommerce it's not nearly as developed or have the focus to manage large retailers without substantial heavy lifting. First here are some of great examples we were given that I'm going to disect:

The first day of DrupalCon has come to a close and one of the most insightful sessions I attended so far was given by Nicole Lind, entitled, “I’m Leaving You: Risks of Dumping Your Old CMS for Drupal and How to Manage Them.” In this session, Nicole discussed the various challenges encountered in a migration project—such as lack of communication or unclear expectations—and some strategies for overcoming them, including:

I hope you are as excited as I am about DrupalCon 2012. Unleashed will be providing a multitude of angles of the DrupalCon coverage. If you have an eye for design, or are interest in the latest and greatest UX techniques follow my posts on Twitter @SGreenwellUT and check back on the blog for a daily conference update. Below are a few of the sessions I will be attending, if you happen to be there don't be afraid to say hello :-)

First, an introduction, my name is Jen Silate and I am the newest member of the Unleashed Technologies team. I am responsible for managing Unleashed Technologies' marketing efforts and this will be my first DrupalCon experience. Since I'm a DrupalCon newbie, while I'm at the conference it's my mission to absorb as much as I can about Drupal and the Drupal community. I'm particularly interested in the case studies that will be presented so that I can more fully understand why organizations choose to move their websites to Drupal, how Drupal improves a business' online presence, and what other benefits it delivers. 

Here are some of the sessions I'm planning to attend:

Next week is DrupalCon 2012 and Unleashed Technologies will be there to report on what's next in full force. The week-long conference is to be held this year in Denver, Colorado, home of Tebowmania and thin air. Since 2010, the conference has become an increasing valuable resource for sharing best practices and getting a glimpse at what the future has in store as Drupal continues to set the benchmark in the open source community as the premier open source content platform. We'll be out there reporting on the different sessions, educational tracks, and after hours events, ensuring that those unable to attend can still have access to the valuable information about the future of Drupal and experience a bit of DrupalCon.

The “Social Media” module for the Drupal 7 platform is a great tool for website admins to take full advantage of social network integration. It helps connect your website with social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, digg, Linked In, and Google+, just to name a few. Lending you total control over commanding your centralized hub of profile information as well as powerful options for utilizing widgets and plug-ins such as follow, like, and share buttons, it is easy to see why it has its advantages. Follow me on a quick walk-through to get started using this powerful tool today!