Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.
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PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score7 out of 10
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PowerDMS by NEOGOV is a software platform designed to recruit, train, equip, and protect employees across their careers, used for policy management, community engagement, and staff scheduling.
If you want to set up a basic Not For Profit (NFP) Membership system and content base, Word Press is easier than Drupal. However, if you have specific needs that require a fair bit of customisation then Drupal is the best CRM available. If the webmaster is confident with PHP and SQL, Drupal allows a lot of creativity.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
This software is very well suited for law enforcement agencies of all sizes from 5 to 5000 officers. There is a mobile app that allows officers to quickly and easily search while out in the field or on a call. They can quickly review a policy, locate a form, pull up a map and much more using either the mobile app or the desktop application.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Policy management- [Users] sign for, and can take [tests] to prove understanding of policy right in the application. As [the] policy is updated, old versions are retained, so that we not only know what a policy contains, we can track changes and provide information on what a policy was at any given time in the past.
Training- Users receive notifications when training is due and are guided to complete the training. If the training requires recertification, PowerDMS can be configured to alert the user that re-training is needed, without a supervisor needing to keep track. All documents used in training, including presentations and videos, can be contained in the PowerDMS course, so we can prove not only that an employee was trained, but exactly what curriculum was use din any given training.
Accreditation Assessment- [Our] accreditation standards manual is uploaded directly into PowerDMS. Proofs are accomplished using the actual policy and procedure, as well as the documents created during the workday. There is absolutely no duplication of effort.
Communications accountability- Email [can] be read and forgotten. With PowerDMS, a document can be distributed for user signatures, insuring that the user took affirmative action to read and understand the document.
This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The Workflow process in PowerDMS is not as easy to grasp as some of the other concepts and requires a little more explaination, especially for non-administrative background users.
Users are unable to view the steps in a Workflow template in order to determine which Workflow would work best for their needs when routing documents.
It would be great to have multiple message options for past due inbox notifications in addition to the options for past due tasks to encourage users to go to their inbox to review their messages.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
I have had nothing but positive experiences with PowerDMS from day one. If we ever run into a situation we are unsure of, PowerDMS support has ALWAYS been able to answer us basically immediately. I really love that they are constantly seeking to improve and expand.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
There is a learning curve as with any software system and I have found those users who consistently use the system more have a much higher success rate than those who only log in to sign off on documents. Now that most users have been in the system for over 2 years I consistently hear how much easier the processes are than they originally thought they would be
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We use PowerDMS in the cloud so our performance might be different from other users who use on-premise. The program has always been up with very minimal downtime and always seems responsive and snappy when navigating the UI and searching documents. We don't currently have any integrations with other software.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I just wish we had some in-state support. The contacts I have had with customer support have been great. Awesome communication, problem-solving, and support. I have talked to and met Stephanie Williams (CSA for Power DMS) at the most recent Entrust conference. She was professional and devoted time to addressing our agency needs.
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 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.
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%
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Implementation of PowerDMS was near seamless. The product was able to input existing policies and procedures within a few hours, which helped to lay the foundation for future use. Having PowerDMS on-boarding readily available was also a huge benefit.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
PowerDMS is a lot different than Linkedin Learnings. In PowerDMS you have to create your own courses versus in Linkedin Learnings they provide extensive content on a wide variety of subject matter. Linkedin Learnings is what we have used in our organization for Bias Training and Ethics Training. PowerDMS is the repository for documents and Trainings, so the systems work very differently
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Created efficient processes for approving document revision
Migrated what originally was a paper system to electronic
Accessible for any employee by logging in, employees do not have to seek out policy and procedure binders, and updated documents can be automatically sent to inboxes when updated.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info