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We've been getting several inquiries related to document management in Drupal, and occasionally about OpenAtrium, a Drupal distribution we've used as a base for several projects that needed strong group collaboration functionality.

Heerad asks:

If there's one thing that's constant in the web world, it's change.

A couple weeks ago NPR's Planet Money and This American Life had some really great episodes about the broken patent system. These are great stories for people who don't understand why patents are a problem, but they overlooked a couple of crucial points.

In the world of software and web development simplicity is a funny thing. We are always striving to make our work and our product simple: simple to understand, simple to use, and simple to maintain. This is one of the many reasons we use Drupal as our development framework here at Freelock.

All the planning and preparation in the world won't prevent an incident, but it can greatly reduce the consequences.
Nothing better prepares you for responding to disaster than experience. In the world of web applications, sometimes we act as firefighters, coming in to rescue the smoldering remains of a hacked site, a crashed server, or an unexpected traffic burst.

No matter how diligent you are at preventing vulnerabilities and securing your environment, it's impossible to be completely secure on the Internet. What you can do is plan for how to limit the damage that people can do when they manage to compromise some part of your system. This line of thinking is called "Defense in depth" -- you can't just apply security updates and call it good.

At Freelock, we don't think one backup is enough. All kinds of things can, and often do go wrong. Murphy was an optimist, after all.

How would losing your web site affect your business?
That might seem like a silly question, but a surprising number of small organizations don't think it can happen to them. Think again -- web sites get lost all the time, through a variety of means. The server hosting your site might have a hardware failure. Your site might get hacked. Your web developer might accidentally delete something critical. Your host might go out of business, leaving you stranded. If you're in the tech world, you hear about these incidents all the time.

So here's what I think happened. A bunch of attorneys got really ticked about their computers crashing all the time.