Ironclad started as a joint venture between me and Ben. We were both working in affiliate email marketing, and had used software given to us by another company, and worked with their network of offers, and had our arms around what the industry was doing. At some point, we said to ourselves, we can do this on our own. We were paying a huge percentage of what we made back to the network just to use their software, and I was certain we could build our own for cheaper.
The Linux Foundation had similar requirements to other developer networks. They wanted to be able to connect their developers in such a way that they could communicate efficiently, while also retaining communications to be searched and archived as a knowledgebase. They had an existing mailing list that they wanted to integrate with a new forum feature on the site. Drupal handles this effectively, and we were able to sync up comments and replies on both pieces of technology so they talked to each other.
This project was an incredible learning experience. There were many pieces that were built custom just for Sun/Oracle. I learned how to negotiate corporate america more through this project than ever before.
This project started as a port off of O'Reilly's custom CMS that they had built for Sun, and migration scripts that took all the data and merged it into Drupal nodes. We were building the site, including content types, taxonomies, fields, theme, etc. This included microsites for specific groups within Sun, and custom themes for each of these microsites.