At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston this week, Acquia announced Acquia Commons 2.0, a cloud-based, community website-building tool based on the open source web content management system Drupal.

The new site provides what Acquia calls social as a service: A way to build community websites very quickly with whatever level of social interactions you wish, from social streams, to micro-blogging, to a completely branded social network.

The Commons product is cloud-based and provides a fairly simple configuration process that reduces overall deployment time, according to Acquia.

Brian House VP of marketing at Acquia points out that providing social interactions with customers has become a business imperative and because Acquia Commons is open source and hosted, it reduces overall complexity for customers.

"Commons is the alternative to costly, proprietary social business solutions--offering enterprises a more flexible, better way to create social community sites at a dramatically lower cost," House said in a statement.

In fact, an open source hosted solution could be attractive to a lot of companies that want to build social sites quickly.

The product will available in late July.

For more information:
- see the Acquia press release

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