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It’s a new year, a time of global change and a great time to head to Germany for a Drupal invasion. You won’t want to miss DrupalCamp Cologne (aka Koln) or Drupal Ubercart training. It’s history in the making for Drupal.

Last year I was one of the beta testers for Acquia's Drupal distribution and the Acquia Network.  I was evaluating Acquia's products and services for a potential intranet project at work.  For this particular project, unfortunately, it looks as if Acquia or Drupal wasn't the right solution.  Our regional folks wanted a solution similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint that is more integrated with Microsoft Office and heavily featured in document management.  That's alright though because there are a number of smaller intranet projects at work where Drupal is the perfect solution and a lot of progress is being made in that direction.

Every year, there are some key information technology people that make some of the most sound and trustworthy predictions for the coming year.  I'll be updating this page through the week with links to these visions of what we may expect in 2009.  My own thoughts and vision for 2009 and CMS Report will come later in another post (I am not worthy to place my own comments here). Content Management and Social Publishing Predictions Dries Buytaert (Drupal Project Lead) - Drupal, Acquia, and Mollom Open Source

CMS Report was recently toying with the idea of including paid advertisement in our news feed.  Instead we decided that our readers would be better served by seeing a "thank you" to our sponsors.  A monthly thank you from CMSReport.com seems to be fitting as just a few weeks ago we launched new sponsorship opportunities here at the site. CMS Report wants to thank the following sponsors for their support.

"An objective without strategy, or a strategy without execution remains a dream." -Dries Buytaert, Drupal, Acquia, and Mollom, "Contributing back to Drupal", Buytaert.net. Advertisement: read more

CMS Critic posted a good interview of Drupal Founder, Dries Buytaert.  During the past couple months, Dries and a few other open source project leaders have graciously offered to me their time for an interview.  Unfortunately, I've been so busy that I've delayed the interviews until I have the time to do it right. 

After much waiting and anticipation from the open source content management world, Acquia has officially released Acquia Drupal, a free and commercially supported distribution of the Drupal Web CMS platform that marks the company's first major move since its inception. Unfortunately, in the process, Acquia might end up confusing the new and existing Drupalers more than intended. The Drupal community might consider this as a negative move -- as Acquia, a commercial entity, has associated itself with Drupal, an open source project, a fair bit too much. CMSWire talked with Bryan House, Acquia's product marketing director, to get more insight into this release.

Another Milestone for Acquia, the start-up company founded by Drupal's Dries Buytaert.  I've been reviewing the Acquia products for a couple months and will post my thoughts on it at a later date. After months of hard work, Acquia is now open for business! Starting today, everyone can connect their Drupal 6 site to the Acquia Network to take advantage of our services. Oh my! Complete Story  

Acquia, the commercialization entity that resulted from the Drupal project, has finally released a private beta of Carbon -- its commercial Drupal distribution. They've only been talking about the project since the end of April.

Loopfuse and Acquia have announced the availability of the Loopfuse Integration module for Drupal. The module links Drupal installations to the commercial Loopfuse OneView automated marketing product. The module, funded by Acquia and Loopfuse, was developed to connect the Acquia website to OneView, and has been donated to the Drupal community and is available to download at Drupal.org (link below.)

Webmonkey: "Webmonkey sat down with Dries and Jay to talk about the history of Drupal, where development is headed and the role their new company will play in the project’s future." Complete Story Advertisement: read more

Last week, at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, I moderated a panel on Open Source Platforms. The panelists were:

• Bob Bickel, from Ringside Networks
• John Newton, from Alfresco
• Jeff Whatcott, from Acquia

Although the conference doesn’t audio tape or videotape the breakout sessions in the smaller rooms - only the keynote - they were nice enough to allow us to record the panel’s audio.

Acquia presented at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week, and Jeff Whatcott, who manned the Acquia stand, writes in a blog entry that most of the corporate types swinging past his booth had no idea what Drupal was.

Acquia, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert's new company, took to the stage last Thursday at the Launch Pad session at the web 2.0 Expo in SF. Although they didn't win the people's choice for best startup (this honor went to Triggit), their soon to be released Carbon and Spokes programs are still plenty enticing.