The thought of using an open source platform for a professional deployment within a demanding enterprise brings to mind a harrying array of possibilities: programmers unable to see the business issues and work as part of a team, a lack of documentation, hacked code and non-existent project management skills. Well, not anymore.

The Blue Shirt Nation team of Best Buy™ had as its goal to build a dynamic, user driven social networking site for their employees’ use. The Blue Shirt Nation founders, Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt, had a vision of creating a feature rich environment for the exchange of cross-functional ideas, sharing of best practices and stimulating the creation of new approaches or services. They also needed it to be stable and scalable. In essence, they needed a functionally advanced social networking site, professionally rigorous enough to handle future demands. Not what you typically think of with an open source platform.

Enter Achieve Internet’s adept and experienced team of Drupal developers. Although Blue Shirt Nation’s internal team was technically sound they needed specific social networking development expertise to really make their vision shine. The Blue Shirt Nation team had also decided to use a collaborative development scenario; therefore they needed a firm to bring innovative, customized solutions, within the confines of group development. Achieve Internet’s President, Ron Huber, said “Although we thrive in handling large scale development projects from start-to-finish, we also enjoy adding value to our clients by leveraging our Drupal expertise in anyway needed.”

Achieve Internet was brought in to specifically apply their Drupal programming expertise, along with professional project management tools, to implement the Blue Shirt Nation ideas. But, given their leadership in the open source community, they did more than that. The Achieve Internet team provided new insights into social networking functionality and custom built tools such as: dynamically displayed interfaces for tagging content, uploading of personal and professional preferences and user controlled access of their profiles along with a custom resume creation application.

All of these fully documented, unique features combine to create the robust user environment and stable platform the Blue Shirt Nation had as its goal. Achieve Internet’s project managers, commitment to professionalism in a team environment and their Drupal expertise have created tremendous results, really; high impact, cool applications, but built by professionals, for professional results.