Recovery.org rebuilt on MOSS

Recovery.org  was very recently re-developed on SharePoint and is another good example of how different branding approaches, functionality and integration can be applied to SharePoint sites.

Recovery.gov is the U.S. government’s official website providing easy access to data related to Recovery Act spending and allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse.

The impetus for the move to MOSS was:
- Users were not able to follow the recovery funds from beginning to end as the Obama administration had envisioned — and promised.
- Nor could site administrators use the site to handle the approval process needed to collect, sort and display spending data being collected from recipients of the funds.
- As a result, the site became a target and verbal punching bag for watchdogs, open government advocates and lawmakers who were underwhelmed with the content and capability of Recovery.gov.

I don’t see this as any shortcomings with Drupal, as an enterprise technology MOSS is designed to peer into a multitude of databases and surface data to the web, Drupal is fantastic and in many cases Gartner regards it as a leader in social web technologies.

The following article details the reasons behind the movement away from the  open source platform Drupal to SharePoint:

Recovery.gov revamped with an unexpected helper - SharePoint
 
Word from the SharePoint 2010 conference in Vegas as that it took approximately 9 weeks to develop, which is a very good effort. Run through validation it brings up a number of errors, which means it’s having a bit of trouble meeting web standards compliancy, but good effort all round.