Rationale for using Drupal in the development of the UN website
1. Content Management
Drupal is open source software maintained and developed by a community of over 1,000,000
users and developers.
Drupal has ability to organize structure, find and re-use content. Categorize with taxonomy,
automatically create friendly path urls, create custom lists, associate content with other content
on the site, and create smart defaults for content creators.
With Drupal, content can be managed with an easy-to-use web interface. Drupal's flexibility
handles countless content types including video, text, blog, podcasts, and polls with robust user
management, menu handling, real-time statistics and optional revision control.
2. RSS Feeds and Social Networking
Drupal makes it easy to connect the website to other sites and services across the web, using
aggregation, feeds, and search engine connection capabilities. Social networking integration is
also widely supported to help engage with a wider audience. Drupal also offers the site easy
ways to interact with external media and file services.
3. User Management
Drupal provides great options for new user accounts and user permissions. Users can be
assigned one or more roles, and each role can be set up with fine-grained permissions allowing
users view and create only what the administrator permits. The Drupal 7 admin theme makes
administering a site easier.
4. Support
With more than 16,000 available modules, the vast majority of your site's requirements can be
addressed with Drupal core and available add-on modules.
5. Multisite Functionality
Different sub-sites will share a single Drupal installation (including core code, contributed
modules, and themes) which will enable upgrade to be done once.
6. Work-Flow Functionality
Drupal provides a contributed module called Maestro, a workflow engine/solution that will
facilitate simple and complex business process automation.
Maestro Features:
Maestro has a workflow engine that executes templates created using a visual workflow editor.
The workflow engine runs in the background and executes the workflow tasks, testing the tasks
execution results and branch the workflow if required. The workflow engine will run every x
seconds and execute all tasks that are in the queue which have not yet completed. Once they
execute and return a success status, the engine will archive them and step the workflow
forward. Both these components have been developed to support any number of different task
types.
Maestro is built to be extended with new task types and contains tasks that are aware of web
forms, entity forms, content types, rules and triggers. Custom interactive functions and batch
functions can be added for custom business logic or integration.
Maestro Work Flows
7. Document Management
Drupal provides the Filedepot module, a full featured Document Management module that has a
Google docs like feel. It fulfills the need for an integrated file management module supporting
role and user based security. Documents can be saved outside the Drupal public directory to
protect documents for safe access and distribution.
Drupal Document Management Module Features:

Intuitive and convenient combination of features and modern Web 2.0 design provides
the users with the familiar interface to organize and find their files. Cloud Tag and File
tagging support to organize and search your files.

Files of all types can be stored in Filedepot. The module admin allows you to define the
allowable file extension and mime types.

Flexible permission model allows you to delegate folder administration to other users.
Setup, view, download and upload access for selected users or roles. Any combination of
permissions can be setup per folder.

Support for the Filebuilder desktop application for bulk uploading and remote
management: Users can easily upload one or hundreds of files and very large files
directly to the Filedepot document repository. Simply drag and drop files from their
local desktop and they are uploaded.

Document tagging allows users to search the repository by popular tags. Users can
easily see what tags have been used and select one of multiple tags to display a filtered
view of files in the document repository.

Users can upload new versions of files and the newer file will automatically be
versioned. Previous versions are still available. When used with the desktop client, users
can have the hosted file in Filedepot automatically updated each time the user saves the
file thus, online editing.

Users can selectively receive notifications of new files that are added or changed and
subscribe to individual file updates or complete folders. The file owner can use the
Broadcast feature to send out a personalized notification.

There are convenient reports to view latest files, most recent folders, bookmarked files,
locked or un-read files.

Users can flag document as 'locked' to alert users that it is being updated.
Filedepot
Further details on the above features can be accessed online at
https://www.drupal.org/project/maestro and https://www.drupal.org/project/filedepot