29 September 2008
Ahmedabad, India

Last week saw a very famous college SVNIT, Surat - inviting Gloscon Solutions Pvt. Ltd. to conduct a workshop on Drupal as part of the technical festival 'ACM Quest 2008' which was organized by the student chapter of ACM. Gloscon had previously conducted several Drupal seminars and workshops at different Technical colleges in Gujarat with overwhelming response and this was another invitation from a leading technical institute to learn more about capabilities of Drupal and at the same time for students to see some of the products being built by Gloscon for domestic markets.

Gloscon has become famous in India especially the western region because of its efforts in promoting Drupal and other Open Source technologies. Gloscon has been a well known Drupal vendor providing Drupal based services to clients in US, UK, Canada and Australia. Some of Gloscon's well known clients include, SUN, CISCO, MDS Inc. and Luxury Marketing Council. 

Gloscon in association with SVNIT organized a 3 hour workshop as part of the technical festival which was attended by more than 600 students from nearly 6 technical colleges. Gloscon team consisted of Rajat Gupta, Director (OpenKick), Anjan Doshi (Jr. Project Manager -Gloscon) and Pinal Salot (Jr. Software Engineer - OpenKick). Openkick is a Training and Incubation division of Gloscon that provides project based dedicated Drupal resources along with training local resources in Drupal and Ruby on Rails.

The complete event was divided into 2 parts which started with a Seminar on the future of Opensource and Drupal taken by Rajat Gupta. This was followed by a workshop on Drupal conducted by Anjan Doshi and Pinal Salot which involved students to actually install Drupal and start working on it.

The duration of the workshop was 3 hours which covered topics such as:

1. Drupal – Introduction
2. Drupal – Features
   Requirements
3. WAMP Installation
4. Drupal Installation
5. Drupal Terminology – Nodes/Blocks/Modules
6. Making Drupal website in 1 hour
7. Practical applications of Drupal
8. Future of Drupal

Since there were some students who had previous experience in implementing Drupal, it became all too interesting since, the team at Gloscon had never had the chance to face technical Drupal questions in previous seminars. This also shows that the word of mouth about Open Source spreads quickly and while previously the students were unaware of Drupal or Ruby on Rails, this time the audience has many students who had played around with Drupal CMS.

Gloscon also distributed Drupal learning materials such as basics of installing Drupal 5, 6 version, important resources, benefits of using Drupal and important companies both National and International that are working in Drupal.

Overall, it was another effort of Gloscon to educate students and community members about the benefits of Drupal.