Drupal 7 Is Out. Runs On Windows Azure, Windows Server, & MS SQL Server!

Earlier this month, Drupal 7 was released.  Drupal 7 is a "friendly and powerful content management platform for building nearly any kind of website: from blogs and micro-sides to collaborative social communities” (from the Drupal site).  Over the past couple of years, through collaboration with the Drupal community, Microsoft has worked to help enable support for Drupal on the Microsoft Platform.  This has included support for running Drupal on Windows Server, as well as Drupal being available in the Microsoft Web Platform installer.

Today, the Microsoft Interoperability team has announced a slew of new improvements that bring even better Drupal interoperability with the Microsoft platform!  These include:

• Inclusion of Drupal 7 in the Microsoft Web Application Gallery & newly released Microsoft WebMatrix tool.  This is THE easiest way to get started creating a Drupal site on Windows!
• Drupal 7, using a new PDO-based data access layer, comes with support for Microsoft SQL Server “out of the box”.
• 4 new Drupal modules to enable administrators/developers to provide their users with new features including: Bing Maps for Drupal, Silverlight Pivot viewer for Drupal, Windows Live ID for Drupal, and oData for Drupal.
• Demonstration of ongoing work with PHP & Windows Azure, showing how to run Drupal on Windows Azure.

These announcements are great stuff, and I’m happy to finally see these things be released after being aware of their development for a while now.  One thing that is of interest to me given my focus on the Azure platform lately, is to see Drupal running on Azure.  My teammate, Jim O’Neil, showed how to use the new Windows Azure Companion to get WordPress running last fall.  I’m happy to see that the companion tool can also be used to get Drupal 7 running in Azure too!  The (long) blog post that Jas Sandhu wrote up, features plenty of screenshots detailing all of the steps to get it running.