Feel the source

One of the most attractive features of open-source technology is that the source code can be viewed, copied and modified by any individual or organisation. Add free licensing and content management suddenly becomes much more exciting.

By Jessica Twentyman

According to Ian Dolphin, head of e-strategy at the University of Hull, the market for packaged content-management software is “seriously immature”. It is, he says, awash with costly products that are complex to implement and which frequently fail to address the demands of many vertical industries, including the higher education sector.

For that reason, when Dolphin was looking for a system that would enable the university to manage and update its main website and to publish documents to its portal for students and faculty members, there was no question that he and his team would become involved in a lengthy tendering process with a large number of commercial web-content management (WCM) software suppliers.

Instead, Dolphin decided to turn to the open-source community. “From the start, we believed that open-source content-management tools would be far better placed to meet our needs in terms of price, function and flexibility,” he says.

Ultimately, the university settled on Hypercontent, an open-source WCM system originally developed at Columbia University in the US. “I sit on the board of directors of JA-SIG, an independent body that focuses on the promotion of Java-based technologies and architectures in the higher education sector,” Dolphin explains. “Since March 2004, JA-SIG has sponsored Hypercontent, so it was not a difficult decision to make. My team had observed the gestation and birth of Hypercontent from its earliest days and were closely acquainted with the people responsible for its development. So, we were pretty confident it was the right fit for us.”

Not only does the technology provide a good match for the Java and XML skills that the University of Hull already has in-house, says Dolphin, but it also enables non-technical staff (such as departmental secretaries) to publish content to the website with relative ease.

It has enabled the university to create a website that is widely accessible to students and faculty, in accordance with the Disability Discrimination Act. “Core content is made available in multiple versions through the system so that it can, for example, be optimised for the types of screen readers used by people with sight difficulties,” he says.

Another crucial factor: the software itself is free. As with other forms of open-source technology, the source code of Hypercontent is published and made freely available, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying for licences, royalties or fees. The product evolves through the co-operation of a community of users that has formed around it, from individual programmers to very large institutions. That model, says Dolphin, makes an open-source content-management system (CMS) a hugely more attractive alternative to the many high-cost, high-risk packaged approaches available.

Many organisations are coming to a similar conclusion, says Robert Markham, an analyst with Forrester Research. He says that in recent years, open-source content-management systems have matured to the point where they offer “a credible alternative” to packaged commercial systems. And, perhaps more importantly, a number of systems integrators are starting to develop practices around open-source content management, blending programming expertise with vertical-industry knowledge to create systems that meet smaller clients’ needs at a price that is frequently more palatable to them.

One organisation actively enabling smaller companies to take advantage of the open-source CMS proposition is Open Advantage, a consultancy funded in the UK by regional development agency, Advantage West Midlands. It provides a wide range of free training courses in open-source tools and applications, as well as business-consultancy services, to companies in the region, with a view to stimulating the local economy through the use of open source.

Although initially an uphill struggle, it has quickly gained momentum, says Paul Cooper, assistant director of OpenAdvantage. “When we first came up with the idea, open source was a pretty unfamiliar concept to many companies in our region and a certain degree of education was involved,” he says. “Now, we can’t keep up with demand. There is a real understanding of the efficiencies to be gained from using open source, and all of our courses are massively over-subscribed.”

Part of Open Advantage’s work involves carrying out rigorous reviews of open-source content-management systems, which it then publishes on its website, www.openadvantage.org.

The two systems most regularly recommended by Open Advantage are Mambo and Plone. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, says Eliot Smith, technical director at Open Advantage. “For example, Mambo is relatively simple to set up, but lacks the customisation capabilities of more powerful CMS solutions and has a complex administrative interface.

Plone, on the other hand, is extremely flexible and can be used to build very powerful systems, but the learning curve if you want to customise it is steep,” he says. Other systems recently reviewed by Smith are Silva, Lenya, Drupal and Exponent.

On the whole, the open-source CMS products currently available are geared primarily for web content, rather than for more general enterprise-content management (ECM). But that is starting to change. October 2005 saw the launch of Alfresco Software, which its management boasts is “the world’s first open source ECM product”. The company’s pedigree is impressive: it was founded by John Newton, the co-founder of ECM market leader Documentum (now part of EMC) and

John Powell, a former chief-operating officer of business-intelligence tools vendor Business Objects. Alfresco licenses its software under the Lesser General Public License, a set of conditions governing the use of many open-source projects. It has made the product available through its website, www.alfresco.org, as well as a number of open-source code repositories, including Sourceforge.net. To date, more than 100,000 downloads of Alfresco have been recorded, says Ian Howells, vice president of marketing for Alfresco Software.

Unlike most proprietary ECM software, there is no cost for downloading the product. Instead, the company makes its money on the services it provides around Alfresco, explains Howells, adding that, of the $2.5bn spent annually on ECM worldwide, over half is spent on services.

Making ECM software free for download makes it accessible to companies that could not afford to buy licenses from the enterprise ECM suppliers, according to Howells. A range of services packages, meanwhile, are available to support different sizes of end-user organisation.

That model also encourages a dialogue between customers and Alfresco’s team of developers, which proprietary vendors can’t match, Howells claims. “In the open-source model, the whole community works together in a way that we believe will create a product as good as or better than the leading proprietary packages,” he says. “Many companies are already familiar with using open source in other areas of the so-called ‘software stack’, such as the operating system, the database or the application server. To our minds, ECM is simply the logical next step.”

Already, Alfresco can boast some impressive customer references. Among them is business-publishing company Informa. “We realised early on that the costs associated with the implementation of a traditional CMS across the enterprise would be difficult to justify to our executive board,” says Bob Hecht, vice president of content strategy at Informa. “Alfresco’s business model and open-standards approach provides my company with the flexibility to bring to bear the most appropriate solutions for our business, by removing our dependency on proprietary software suites and their associated costs.”

Naturally, implementing open-source content management is not without its challenges, warns Markham. “Because open-source components are so easy to acquire, they place tremendous pressure on the IT purchase approval and due diligence processes,” he says. “At the core of the decision for [open-source] content-management software is whether dependency on IT increases – which could potentially slow adoption and acceptance of the solution.”

And while licenses may be free, implementation certainly is not. Indeed, some organisations have found that their projects have costed as much (if not more) than if they had bought commercial software. The right in-house skills or outside assistance is vital, say experts.

But for many organisations, open-source content management is opening up new ways of doing business that had previously seemed unattainable.

Ask the right questions
One of the great advantages of open-source software is that there are no licence fees to pay. One of the drawbacks, however, is that there are no sales people to give advice on the right product to choose. Also, ongoing support and maintenance is likely to be a more collaborative effort, carried out in a more ad-hoc, less structured way.

Despite this, Forrester Research has come up with a six-point plan for evaluating open-source systems in order to minimise risk. You should consider the following:

1.         Whether quality documentation is available, such as books and manuals;
2.         The size of the open-source developer community around the product;
3.         The development language and whether you have, or are able to recruit, those skills;
4.         Whether the licensing is clear and palatable;
5.         The technical maturity of the system;
6.         Whether it is based on truly open standards, such as WebDav, for integration with standard office applications.