Drupal Commons is a ready-to-use solution for building either internal or external communities. It provides a complete social business software solution for organizations.

Drupal Commons helps organize content into topic groups with blog, discussion, and document, wiki, and event content types. It also allows users to create relationships with each other in order to follow each other’s activities on a site. Authenticated users can view a personalized dashboard containing content from all their subscribed groups.

Drupal Commons provides freedom from the limitations of proprietary social software. Based on the hugely-popular Drupal Web CMS, Drupal Commons adds a complete layer of social business features that are ready-to-use on installation, and which don’t suffer from the constraints of proprietary alternatives.

Why social business software or community project required?

• Increase productivity of skilled employees both within and outside of the enterprise by getting solutions from everywhere.
• Need to share ideas to accelerate innovation.
• Streamline communications and break down the walls of location.
• Participation and conversation beyond corporate boundaries to infuse knowledge and expertise into organizations.
• Keep customers informed and get in touch faster and at lower cost.
• Intranet for organizations, Universities, schools etc.

Why Drupal Commons?

Drupal Commons provides a rich set of features from which you can choose to construct your social business software site to meet the needs of your community, including:

• Users with rich profiles
• LDAP Integration
• Groups, with varying access control
• Friend relationships, enabling users to follow the activity of people they work with
• List of recent activity within a group or across all groups to which a user belongs
• Recent blog or micro blog posts in subscribed-to groups
• Tags -  along with tag clouds and content listing by tag
• RSS feeds for group activity
• Content bookmarks
• Site analytics
• Faceted search with filters
• Email updates on new content

Advantage of Drupal Commons

• Drupal Commons is safe to use: license-safe and technology-safe and Drupal is a very secure software platform.
• Drupal is free from pricing penalties
• A user (organization) does not need to already be using Drupal as their main website platform before they can deploy and use Drupal Commons.
• Drupal (Commons) is SEO-friendly.

Social Business is a mandate which Drupal can satisfy

• The community that your organization serves wants to interact – with each other, and with you. Your organization can nurture and grow with this community if you can provide the infrastructure. Two things need to be combined in this infrastructure: a CMS with Web 2.0 capabilities, like blogs, tagging, etc., plus the social features users are accustomed to, such as groups, project spaces, and status activity postings.
• Drupal combines all these capabilities into a single, free package. It accomplishes this through the power of open source, which provides speedy technical advancement from the community with the no-cost licensing model of free software.

Drupal Commons communities

• Symantec feeds its corporate community – Symantec created its community site to create closer connection with customers of its commercial business products.
• CNN adds citizen journalism – Organizations facing structural change in their industry are among the first to recognize the shift to social publishing – because they must.
• Intel – Developer Program
• Sony Ericsson Labs
• New York Senate
• Dat.gov.uk
• Verizon Wireless

For more details please refer http://apcug.net/virtual/nov12/101129-drupalcommonsoverview.pdf