Jason Sharp

Session: Multi-Departmental Authoring in Drupal [Drupal Track, Intermediate Level]

Drupal provides immense flexibility and features. However, often its permissions implement an all or nothing model which makes a challenging job of fine-grained, role-based and content-specific access control. This presentation offers a solution to a common request on the D.O. forums: how to authorize multiple groups of authors to control subsections of a multi-departmental site. This presentation illustrates a Drupal 6 case study in which an intranet portal serving 5000 employees for a local DFW media company required support for authoring content across its 14 departments. Authors of the same department can edit, review, and publish the same subset of content. Those belonging to another department share authoring responsibilities of their subset of content, but no author can overstep content in a different department. Attendees will learn how to accomplish this capability by leveraging some key Drupal modules, and time permitting, discuss some other sophisticated solutions in this case study.

About Jason Sharp

Jason is co-founder and President of Crossvale, Inc. a professional services firm singularly focused on helping their clients maximize the performance of their people, processes and technologies by providing tailored integration, automation and portal solutions that deliver results.

Since 1995, Jason has been an advocate for using new technologies to reorient and improve organizations. An Oracle ACE and founding BEA Technical Director, he has been mentoring, consulting, and training organizations on behalf of market-leading vendors. As an accomplished distributed systems architect and developer, Jason has introduced innovations such as: Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), enterprise portals, business-to-business integration (B2Bi), business process management (BPM), and enterprise application integration (EAI) to major enterprises, worldwide.

He has championed open-source solutions and collaborative industry standards throughout his career. Since 1989, Jason developed object-oriented database systems, implemented CORBA, Java technologies, and J2EE/EJB application servers. He and Crossvale currently deploy Drupal and enterprise JAVA & PHP solutions for Human Resources, Banking and Government enterprises.