This presentation was delivered by Adrian Rollett and I at DrupalCamp Austin 2009. It discusses the potential of the Drupal features module, installation profiles, and drush_make in building polished, custom Drupal distributions.

We're using these techniques already at UNT in the Drupal distribution we provide to our users; setting up a custom Drupal distribution can really be helpful in an educational context where you need to be able to set up new Drupal instances quickly that are already pre-configured for the most common use cases around campus.