Having come from a marketing agency background I was used to understanding clients requirements quickly and developing campaigns on the fly. So, getting to know Invotra wasn’t going to be a problem…famous last words.
Understanding ‘the product’, it’s an Intranet…tick, it’s open source…tick, it helps internal communicators and employee engagement…tick tick… Then I think, ‘but what’s Invotra’s USP?’.
The question that can make professional’s shudder.
So, I start to dig and poke until I uncover something very interesting. It might not be the USP but it’s interesting. So, in a marketing type voice…bear with…this is how it happened.
We were in a scoping meeting with a new client and they were using a Drupal site to cover some of the features and functionality that they needed internally and their incumbent intranet couldn’t deliver. The IT department had put together a version internally and needed to keep it as an interim solution, they turned to us for help to build and maintain it.
The question was posed innocently but the answer came like a tidal wave…all about open source programming, the management of the updates, the testing widgets that account for thousands and thousands of unimaginable test scenarios and scripts that fulfil the acceptance criteria. Where to find the widgets, who to look out for in the Drupal community, what modules are good and which are not so good. Not only that, but the priceless information about the security which was a really important factor to them.
It was a real eye opener. And it dawned on me that Open Source is free to use and it’s brilliant, without doubt. It’s reliable, secure, scalable, trustworthy and free. You can be good on Drupal with good web development knowledge, but to be great you have to have invested time in the community, developed trust among peers and you can’t do that overnight…nor can it be bought…it’s priceless!
So, what did I uncover…? That we have something that’s extremely rare in-house and that’s an amazing relationship with one of the biggest tech communities in the world, all 1,500,000 of the Drupal Community. And, you can’t buy that.
