At OJC (my day job) we embraced Drupal as our primary CMS of choice (or at least mine) going on a couple years ago. Locally, the University of Illinois and its various campuses and schools have started to do the same. With OJC being a familiar name around the school, my colleague Brandon Bowersox put together a nice list local centric Why Drupal? and of course why OJC :)

Units across campus are using Drupal:

· WILL AM/FM/TV, including PrairieFire http://will.illinois.edu/prairiefire

· College of Education, including IEP Quality http://iepq.ed.uiuc.edu/

· College of ACES, including http://students.aces.uiuc.edu/ http://global.aces.uiuc.edu/ and http://advancement.aces.uiuc.edu/

· Center for Global Studies, new website by OJC underway powered by Drupal

· UIC Institute for Health Research and Policy http://www.ihrp.uic.edu/

· Center for Prevention Research and Development AIMS http://www.aims.uiuc.edu/, existing design with Drupal implementation by OJC

· Department of Kinesiology, IPACS https://www.kines.uiuc.edu/IPACS/, design by Creative Services and Drupal custom modules and implementation by OJC

· Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, new website by OJC underway powered by Drupal

· CITES Ed Tech

· AITS (used for about 3 sites already with an RFP process with OBFS to select a tool for 30+ sites)

Two of the Four ‘Best of the Web 2008’ award winners at the University of Illinois 9th Annual Webmasters Forum were powered by Drupal. A 1-day “Drupal Boot Camp” in Spring 2008 hosted by the University of Illinois with OJC as a key presenter got over 80 attendees from units across the University.

Units across campus are migrating to Drupal because it is technical robust while also user-friendly for content updaters. Units with varying levels of technical sophistication are finding that contracting for support and maintenance from OJC allows them to have as much or as little support as they need to be successful with Drupal. Some departments such as UIC IHRP have internal staff who have learned Drupal and perform sophisticated enhancements on their own, while only occasssionally relying on OJC to ask questions or advice. Other units such as CPRD AIMS have no technical staff in-house who manage Drupal and rely fully on OJC to support the tool and keep Drupal running smoothly for non-technical content authors.

Drupal provides the full set of features that make it a robust and user-friendly CMS:

· In-site editing for non-technical content authors, who can simply click through the website itself and click the Edit tab to make changes

· Search-engine friendly and user-friendly URLs such as http://www.ihrp.uic.edu/researcher/susan-j-curry-phd without the need for numerical IDs (?contentId=8765.432 or obfshome.cfm?level=1&path=accounts&xmldata=accounts1), file extensions (.aspx or .shtml) , or escape sequences (latest%20news.php)

· Hundreds of robust add-on modules and a solid, secure open source foundation similar to other successful open source tools such as Linux or Apache.