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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Webex Meetings
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Webex Meetings is a video conferencing solution powering hybrid work. It enables a seamless collaboration experience and better results with meetings that are designed to give everyone the ability to engage no matter their location, language, or communication style.
Well, I'm definitely biased, I've been working with Drupal for 12+ years, and I can say it's appropriate for any size/scale of a project, whether it's a small catalog website or a huge corporation. If I want to dial it down to a specific use case, Drupal is best what most customers/clients that have high-security standards, and need to have extensive editorial experience and control over their website's architecture. Due to its core design, Drupal can connect with each part of its own and any external third-party resources quite easily. For a less-suited scenario, I might say that if you don't have enough budget to get proper work done, sometimes just using WordPress with a pre-designed theme might sound better to you, but if you have the budget and the time, always go with Drupal
Good examples: - Conducting trainings and courses - Planning meetings and inviting colleagues to attend - Presenting topics to a large group of people - Speech reproduction is very good - assigning rights and copresentor Not so good: - Interaction with other applications - Mute microphones when using multiple clients - Video call quality - Tracking history, private settings
Content Types... these are amazing. Whereas a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress will basically allow you to make posts and build pages, Drupal 8 gives you the ability to define different types of content that behave differently, and are served up differently in different areas of the website.
Extensibility... it scales, ohhhh does it scale. They've really figured out server-side caching, and it makes all the difference. Once a page has been cached, it's available instantly to all users worldwide; and when coupled with AWS, global redundancy and localization mean that no matter where you're accessing the site, it always loads fast and crisp.
Workflows... you have the ability to define very specific roles and/or user-based editorial workflows, allowing for as many touchpoints and reviews between content creation and publication as you'll require.
We have a global and diverse team with different devices and operating systems. Webex works smoothly on all of them and everyone can collaborate in real-time saving a lot of time and effort, making meetings much more productive.
We can easily capture discussion points and decisions for future reference, without the need for manual note-taking. It helps us in smaller group discussions and brainstorming sessions within the main meeting itself.
I can even tailor the layout to suit the meeting's purpose and agenda. Webex is intuitive and easy to navigate, even for non-technical users, joining and scheduling meetings is a smooth process.
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.
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.
Webex is going in a direction which is going to make it incompatible with how we use it. They're more interested in developing the gimmicky AI features and leaving behind the core ability to share documents and allow participants to annotate and save annotated shared documents and other features that were what made it the best choice for classrooms.
It's a great CMS platform and there are a ton of plugins to add some serious functionality, but the security updates are too complex to implement and considering the complexity of the platform, security updates are a must. I don't want my site breached because they make it too difficult to keep it up to date.
Webex Meetings does not provide enough audio feedback for users with visual disabilities to properly navigate the tool. Students, faculty, and staff who are blind or have low vision may not be able to use Webex Meetings. Users with motor disabilities that navigate via keyboard, may not be able to navigate the web conferencing session enough to participate fully.
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).
So personally I have never faced any kind of meeting unavailability issue while scandaling meeting with WebEx the bandwidth is really good and in terms of application performance the same is my opinion what I mentioned for availability it is good and the objective of communication is quite fruitfully achieved with a simple and effective product like WebEx which is often bundled with the purchase of course which is which we have at our company and great discount is being offered so it is easy on our pocket. I really don't have any specific errors which have faced I should mention over here the operation or application uses is quite smooth.
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.
We use browsers to join Webex Meetings and it is very good no issue also appears from Webex APP is very organized and does not consume more resources of PC so no issues appeared. We join audio and video in many ways, all of which are good. We integrated it with active Microsoft Exchange with easy deployment.
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.
I gave this rating for overall support on Webex meetings because if something goes wrong we have the best support here and rarely need to go to help.webex.com. Multiple people have been appropriately trained so finding the answers to any issues we occur is very simple here at work.
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.
It was straight to the point and very informative. effective training often includes clear explanations, hands-on practice opportunities, time for questions and answers, real-world examples, and follow-up support. If you're trying to assess the quality of a specific training session, you might consider these factors. For organizations looking to assess the quality of their in-person training, it's best to solicit feedback directly from the participants. This can be done through anonymous surveys or feedback sessions, enabling the organization to gather firsthand information and improve future training sessions accordingly.
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.
We mostly use training from Cisco's online training programs which is very informative and can be easily incorporated into our daily schedules without disrupting our normal working activities. There are many online training materials are available on cisco's website as well as other third-party training companies may also provide additional training.
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%
That we needed complex implementation that we didn't get tells me 2 things: 1) the product was not designed in a way that "just worked" like some of its peers (Zoom / BlueJeans) and 2) had our company defined actual user needs and validated / verified that they had bought something that matched those, we would have pursued features / designs more closely aligned with what the product actually does: screen share, sometimes video, definitely VOIP audio (always an option regardless of license), and easy recording and retrieval of meetings.
Drupal is community-backed making it more accessible and growing at a faster rate than Sitefinity which is a proprietary product built on .NET. Drupal is PHP-based using some but not all Symphony codebase. Updates for Drupal are frequent and so are feature adds.
Meetings is the way to go! It blends in with our organization's workflow seamlessly. Teams is great but really suffers in the collaboration department from our personal experience. Webex Meetings is much more fleshed out. The features it has are much more convenient and easier to use. There was a bit of a learning curve, but once you are over that speedbump you are able to get much more use out of Webex Meetings.
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.
I can speak to multiple departments at my organization using Webex Meetings. It has been, and continues to be, our longest online meeting software. It has been deployed across the organization and each department uses it. As I have mentioned, our monthly all-organization Town Halls are hosted on Webex. We have also used it to broadcast a panel-based speaker event.
Drupal has allowed us to build up a library of code and base sites we can reuse to save time which has increased our efficiency and thus had a positive financial impact.
Drupal has allowed us to take on projects we otherwise would not have been able to, having a further impact.
Drupal has allowed us to build great solutions for our clients which give them an excellent ROI.
The costly nature of individual accounts across multiple schools made it difficult to maintain the budget when our student population grew exponentially.
Often communicated to clients and stakeholders that we were a trustworthy and elevated provider.
Limited engagement and interactive features with students often contributed to complaints around student engagement and buy-in.
