What newcomers expect from Drupal

I have been doing Drupal 7 training for UKIT since last December. I have taught 6 sessions, 60 people, most of which were beginners in Drupal.

I always start the session (after my introduction) by asking the participants to tell us who they are, and answer two simple questions - What project brings you here? and What do you think Drupal is? These questions let me adjust to the needs of the participants, and also to gauge their IT knowledge level.

There are a few answers that are recurring:

University supported CMS
Since UK is now behind Drupal, people want to know what it is all about, they want to evaluate the solution for their needs. This one is particularly common if their sites are at the end of the cycle and they are looking for an upgrade path.

Ability to delegate
This is probably the most common reason - not wanting to be the sole gatekeeper on a site, but being able to delegate content editing and creation to several people in several different users. A variation on this from more advanced users is to expect an editing path - setting up different roles and approval processes.

No HTML by hand
People want a high-level tool that will do the dirty tagging for them. They are then very disappointed when you tell them Drupal doesn't come with a WYSIWYG editor out of the box. I like to tell them that Drupal is so much more than a web-based Dreamweaver, but they usually refuse to listen.

Modern technology
This one has many flavors - SEO, analytics, social media, video, flash, PHP, HTML 5 - people want a system that would support all the modern stuff, and that would not lag behind. They are usually not disappointed - they see how easy it is to integrate "modern" into Drupal, and how fast the community responds to change.

Magic
This one shows up every now and then unfortunately. Perhaps Drupal is that magic tool that we have been promised all the time by IT people - one that would do all the work for us? These hopes must be squished, which I do right away. You still have to do the work, and if you want a big complicated site, it is going to be a big, complicated job.

Only occasionally do I hear anything about advanced ideas - something like integrating with other systems like Blackboard - but that is to be expected since we are dealing mostly with newcomers.