Drupal vs. OnBase

Overall, I would give my rating of Drupal a 7/10 because there is an easy user experience for those without a website background but there is some technology work required to build more website capabilities that aren't as user-friendly. Drupal is specifically well suited to update content (like changing Relationship Manager cards when there is employee turnover), post announcements (putting up a holiday banner to let our customers know the dates we will be closed over Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc., and creating a sophisticated website hierarchy of pages (for our firm, several dropdowns depending on if you're looking for personal banking, business banking, investment banking, about us, etc.).

Incentivized

OnBase is a content services solution for organizations that need high visibility to documents or information across multiple teams or departments. It supports users' access control, workflow functionality with transaction history, electronic document retention, and destruction documentation. Hyland can support the organization for implementations or solutions, or the organization can utilize the education services and build out the solution themselves.

Incentivized

• It has excellent security features and consistent updates.
• It allows for extensive customization with the integrated themes and core code, especially when you first install it. This allows our dev team to get creative with marketing initiatives.
• There is a large online community of Drupal users that consistently help answer any questions and issues

Incentivized

• Workflow and Configuration - easy to learn
• Documentation for each application and toolset
• Hyland Account Managers and staff are knowledgeable
• Robust User Community that helps solve an issue or make recommendations
• Web client - no application installation needed on a PC for users

• Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
• Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
• Steep learning curve, but worth it

Incentivized

• I personally find the user inferface to be obnoxious and obtuse.
• When we have issues it is often hard to resolve the problem as there are many variables such as file types, DPI, and scanner setting that combine to make it hard to pinpoint trouble spots.
• The upgrade process has always been a nightmare for our team. We are not on the latest version now due to this issue.

Incentivized

The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.

OnBase has become a core part of our enterprise solutions toolkit due to its ever-growing integration capabilities. Any business process that produces or tracks documents or object entities can be modeled and managed within OnBase and used to supplement almost any line-of-business system that we use.

Incentivized

As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.

Incentivized

You get out of something what you put into it. You reap what you sow! If an organization will spend time setting the solution up, dedicating staff to its development and ongoing support, and always keep the end-user in mind during development, you will have one of the most well-received solutions in your organization. So many organizations that I speak with stand up a solution but don't commit someone to its upkeep and development. It is vital that you have the staff to work within the solution on a daily basis.

Incentivized

Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

Incentivized

As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

Incentivized

This rating is a compromise because I technically have 2 tiers of support.
I go through a re-seller that I give a (10). I send an email and receive acknowledgment within minutes.
For the few times we need to contact Hyland for assistance, it sometimes takes a couple of days to receive a response - and then the first tier might go back and forth a dozen times through email instead of initiating a phone call. And for an advanced issue, they take too long before they forward to an evangelist or someone more knowledgeable that is able to assist. I give that process an (8).

Incentivized

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

The trainer was very knowledgeable and was a Hyland employee. The training was at their corporate headquarters, so it allowed our team to become familiar with organization and culture.

Incentivized

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

With the Premium subscription, there is a tone of training with audio and practice options.

Incentivized

Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

Incentivized

Using Hyland professional services to assist with the implementation made things much easier. They have the knowledge and experience to get the system live as users are expecting

Incentivized

Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.

Incentivized

The version of SharePoint we were utilizing was not very practical. We oftentimes had issues with archived documents, where they could be found or opening them all together. It seemed the older the document the harder it was to access when logged into SharePoint. This is critical in our business as we need to behave full access to documentation sent and received for an owner's account.

Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

Incentivized

• Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
• It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
• Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs

• OnBase provides a very reliable ECM platform for the company.
• OnBase helped to remove the dependency on paper files and file folders. This saved real estate cost as well as facilitated the ability to work from anywhere.
• OnBase made same day processing of all incoming and outgoing documents a reality.

Incentivized