The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is using Acquia's Drupal Commons to bring a social component to its software development platform Forge.mil. Just two weeks ago, developers sharing code or touching base with team members were unable to look beyond their project silos within its two software development arenas, ProjectForge and SourceForge.

"[Now,] the Community layer allows communities of interest to communicate with one another without knowing a lot about the individual projects," explained Forge.mil Project Manager Dan Gahafer during an April 20 press call.

"By collaborating across a community of interest you might be able to find that another project has solved a difficult problem that you're working on and you could communicate that, provide that information to the other project and they could go get your code," he said.

The new site--a March beta release of Forge.mil Community preceded an early April launch--already boasts 10,000 users, said Gahafer.

Gahafer appeared pleased with the new site, noting the "seamless" movement from SoftwareForge to the Community layer. Gahafer also said DISA would have been hard pressed to procure another product as integrated as Drupal Commons in such a short amount of time and within their budget.

The use of Drupal is a singular instance on the Forge.mil platform. SoftwareForge and ProjectForge are built on Collabnet's TeamForge product, said Gahafer. "There's a whole set of technologies that underlie that," he added. "The source code repository is Subversion, for example, which is pre-industry standard open source."

The DISA-maintained Forge.mil service aims to improve the ability of the Defense Department to rapidly deliver dependable, useful software, services and systems in support of net-centric operations and warfare. The Community site is available to U.S. military, DoD government civilians and DoD contractors for government authorized use.

For more:
- listen to the press call 

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