Commons strives to combine the functionality of social networking statuses and micro blogging presenting status updates with capabilities for mentions, likes and shares. A status update can consist only of simple text message, a link or uploaded photo. Users can follow other community members, can maintain personal and group blogs, wikis or discussions and comment any type of content.

Drupal has long been a Web CMS leader in providing a powerful platform for creating and managing users, their roles & permissions. Commons extends the capabilities of Drupal for creating and managing users and their roles and permissions by providing rich personal profiles including user info, picture, points, contact form etc. Every user has its own status stream. Users can increase their exposure to other activities in a community by following other members. Furthermore users can also be tagged, which facilitates the experts search. Commons provides a user listing with the possibility to search for users by job title, location, tags or other filtering criteria.

Commons doesn’t support project management out of the box, but it can be achieved through the installation of additional modules (like Storm), or simply by using Drupal’s custom content types and views module to create Project, Task, or other content types, and then create listings of tasks sorted and filtered - and displayed - as desired. These can be linked to Drupal’s sophisticated workflow and rules systems to go beyond simple listings if desired.

Drupal Commons is open source, and has no license fees associated with it. Organizations can deploy Commons on their own servers in their own data center, do their own self-support, and use Commons free of any cost. Compared to some other proprietary solutions Commons is relatively easy to deploy. Drupal can be hosted as on-premise solution at your company server or as SaaS on the Drupal Cloud. As a PHP-based solution Commons supports Apache and MS IIS as a web server, MySQL or PostgreSQL for database server and all important operating systems (Linux, Unix, Windows). Its architecture is fully modular and developed by the huge Drupal community. To integrate and interact with other systems the services module can be installed. The Drupal Core modules are translated into more than 55 languages, while own translations for several additional modules might be necessary. Due to its flexible modular structure, and thousands of contributed modules to extend the functionality and its Theming flexibility (template system based on HTML/CSS/PHP) the customization and extensibility in Commons is much more powerful than in some other tools.

Because of its extensive use across the Internet, the Drupal community has extended Drupal’s ability to leverage nearly any user authentication mechanism around. To support other authentication mechanisms, additional modules must be installed. For internal communities, Drupal supports the authentication against an LDAP-Server. For externally-facing communities, Commons can utilize OpenID. Commons itself doesn’t provide backup or recovery functionality, but the Drupal community has a wide variety of backup / restores schemes available, as well as a community-wide set of knowledge about how to handle these aspects within the constraints of varying business requirements / tradeoffs. Archiving of content is also not supported. Commons offers a revision control for textual content, but no versioning for files. Publishing workflows are possible through the installation of additional module.
The rights model of Commons is role-based. Permissions are defined per role and not for each user separately. Since the architecture of Drupal is fully modular, each module specifies the possible permissions for its range. Furthermore introduce groups additional access control layer with the definition of private groups and membership management possibilities.

Drupal has extensive online documentations and a powerful issue queue /ticketing system. In addition Acquia offers free webinars, white papers and case studies. The large Drupal community of thousands of members helps with the support of core and contributed modules. For enterprise customers Acquia offers a paid support subscription (Acquia Network Enterprise Subscription Level) which includes 24x7 support by phone, tickets or e-mail, optional hosting in the Acquia Cloud and access to the Acquia knowledge database.