Drupal logo
Baris Wanschers has posted a great review of 10 cool Web sites running Microsoft SharePoint, apparently to prove how good SharePoint is as a Web publishing tool. But I can't help but smile at the irony that Wanschers' site runs Drupal, not SharePoint.
Wanschers writes:
Because so many friends and colleagues of [mine] think of SharePoint as a boring, team-site-only Document Management System I decided to show them some great-looking SharePoint publishing sites and prove them otherwise.
He then provides several examples (Ferrari, Starbucks, and more), but the best counterexample to his post is the "paper" his post is written on: Drupal, an excellent open-source Web content management and publishing system.
To be fair, Wanschers describes himself as both a SharePoint and Drupal developer, so it's natural that he use both (though his blog has exclusively covered SharePoint since its March 2009 launch). But for me it's instructive that however much he may talk about SharePoint as a Web publishing tool, Drupal is what he actually uses to do the job.
Actions speak louder than words.
He's not alone. In fact, with over 1 million downloads each year, it's safe to say that Wanschers is in good company in preferring Drupal for Web publishing. FedEx, Nike, R.E.M., and many others share Wanschers' preference for Drupal for Web publishing.
Disclosure: My company, Alfresco, both partners and competes with Microsoft SharePoint and Drupal.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
One of the hardest things to create in open-source software is a project that attracts significant outside development contributions. While Mozilla can count on 40 percent of its development deriving from non-Mozilla sources, most open-source projects are lucky to get 4 percent from outside contributors--or 0.04 percent.
This is why I find Jahia's licensing model so intriguing. Jahia is an open-source Web Content Management (WCM) vendor that competes with proprietary solutions like Vignette (OpenText) and Interwoven (Autonomy). Unlike most open-source WCM systems, however, Jahia has set up a rewards program to encourage contributions, with significant discounts on a commercial subscription offered in exchange for significant contributions to the Jahia code base, dubbed a "Contribute or Pay" program, as outlined in Jahia's licensing white paper.
No triple charging: Those who contributed based on the JSEL get the software of the next release and all subsequent releases that contain the contributed feature for free within their standard subscription. This is fair, because it avoids commercial contributors getting charged three times: first for paying Jahia to develop and include the new feature, then for obtaining the new release that includes it and finally for maintaining it. Unfortunately, triple charging is the typical business practice for proprietary alternatives to Jahia. Contributors to Jahia EE only pay when they purchase or renew their support subscription, which already includes Jahia software at no additional cost.
Jahia is trying to reward customers and contributors, ensuring that they only have to pay once--in cash or in kind--for the value they contribute to Jahia. Specifically, those who contribute code to Jahia "save on maintenance costs upon approval by Jahia," or they can pay Jahia to write the suggested contributions and won't be charged for maintenance on those additions.
I reached out to Tristan Renaud, vice president of sales and corporate development at Jahia, for further commentary, and will post it once I receive it. For example, how does Jahia determine the value of contributions? And how much will it discount subscription services in exchange for sponsored "contributions" that a customer pays Jahia to develop?
Even without the details, however, I find the approach refreshing. It seems like Jahia is offering a good "quid pro quo" model, as Stephen Croisier suggests, and one that other open-source companies should consider.
Disclosure: Jahia is a competitor to Alfresco, my employer, as well as a potential partner.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Note: This article originally incorrectly stated the pricing for Rockstar support and the version number that has been released. Rockstar Support is actually a one-year agreement and starts at $850 per month. (or $10,200 a year). These changes are reflected below.
There are thousands of open-source content management systems, from Alfresco to Drupal to Joomla, but one that gets less attention yet still delivers great functionality for Intranets and other smaller Web sites is WebGUI, developed by Plain Black.
Plain Black just released WebGUI 7.6 with a host of new functionality, including:
- An enhanced survey engine that allows users to easily create multiple choice, rating scale, and open-response questions;
- Comparison charts (i.e., for putting competitive product or feature matrices, service comparisons, etc. online);
- iPhone application that allows Web administrators to upload images directly to the site from their iPhone;
- iPhoto (and soon-to-be-release Google Picasa) capability to upload directly from a desktop photo application to the Web site;
- And more.
Some of the new functionality seems destined for small to mid-size enterprises, and, indeed, this seems to be the staple of Plain Black's customer base, though it indicates that WebGUI is in use within Fortune 1000 Intranets.
At $850 per year month for "Rockstar Support," or $10,200 per year (annual contract), it can fit within the budgets of the small-business market. Even so, WebGUI 7.6's enhanced ease of use should be attractive to organizations of all sizes.
It's difficult to stand out in the crowded open-source content management system market, but WebGUI 7.6 may make it easier to manage a Web site on a limited budget and limited CMS expertise. It may not be ideal for every organization, but since it's free of charge and licensed under the General Public License, why not give it a try?
Recently ParisHilton.com got hacked. In the rush to find a culprit, however, security experts quoted in InformationWeek incorrectly blamed the open-source Joomla web content management system for the security breaches.
According to [a senior security researcher at ScanSafe], there's an iFrame that has been embedded in the ParisHilton.com Web site....She said it wasn't clear how the iFrame got added to Paris Hilton's site, but she said it could be because of a vulnerability in the open source content management system Joomla, which has been a common factor in other reports.
Such "other reports" include this one in ComputerWeekly. The problem with blaming Joomla for security breaches at ParisHilton.com and many of the other sites in question?
They aren't Joomla sites at all.
This is lazy security "research" by the ScanSafe researcher and other "experts" noted in these articles. It's like me blaming Microsoft for security breaches...on a Linux server. It might make for an easy scapegoat, but that doesn't make it any less untrue.
I spoke with Elin Waring, president of Open Source Matters, a part of the Joomla! project, who suggested that "both times [the security allegations surfaced] within a week of a regular release that included some security patches, which I think probably is not a coincidence." She may have a point. Is the security community seeing the patches and assuming they must have been released to fix the high-profile security website breaches?
This is plausible, but again, ParisHilton.com and others among the websites in question weren't Joomla-managed websites at all. It's therefore understandable when commentators to the InformationWeek story on the ParisHilton.com hack say things like this:
For the expert to say, "it could be because of a vulnerability in the open source content management system Joomla, which has been a common factor in other reports" when not doing the basic research to know if the site was actually running Joomla really brings into question both the credibility of the expert as well as the reporter that quoted said expert.
It "could be" any software package that manages Web sites, because any of them "could have" been the application behind the site in question. Naming a specific Web application in such a manner without being certain it is the one managing the site is ethically and morally wrong if not legally.
Amen. Whether Joomla was simply a convenient scapegoat or a likely culprit, the reporters and "security experts" did a shoddy job by unfairly and inaccurately allocating blame to Joomla. Time for a retraction? The days of being able to casually blame open source for being a security risk are long gone. Time for the "security" community to wake up.
Disclosure: I work for Alfresco, which both competes with and partners with/supports the Joomla open-source WCM project. And, yes, I quite like Joomla.
Drupal has always been a great open-source Web content management system. Forrester called it one of the two open-source content management systems to consider. Its biggest deficiency was arguably a lack of enterprise-class support and polish to support the project.
On Tuesday, however, Acquia, the company behind Drupal, remedied this void, launching its commercially supported distribution of Drupal and a network service to provide updates and other services around the core Drupal distribution.
Acquia is taking a page out of Red Hat's playbook, boiling down the complexity of the deep and wide Drupal community. While I like the look of its Network service, it is the Acquia Drupal distribution that I think is most newsworthy for enterprises looking to adopt Drupal. Dries Buytaert, Drupal's co-founder, explains:
(We are) releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on Drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.
In other words, there's still an open world of community-supported Drupal for those that value cash over time and other resources. But for those that wouldn't mind a shortcut to Drupal-based productivity, there's Acquia Drupal.
It will be interesting to see how well this service takes off, and how its community reacts. As OStatic notes, Acquia's biggest competition will be the Drupal community or, rather, the developers and system integrators who currently make a living providing Drupal-based support. The response so far, however, has been positive from the Drupal community, and I think this will continue.
I suspect Acquia will do just fine as it learns to walk the line between commercial and community. Drupal is an excellent open-source project, and Acquia is filled with similarly excellent people. The marriage of the two should be a boon to enterprises that have adopted or are considering adopting Drupal.
Forrester Research just released a great report detailing the open-source web content management market. In it, Forrester analyst Stephen Powers highlights a shift to open source for managing websites:
As organizations embark on next-generation Web content management (WCM) initiatives, they want to avoid the mistakes made in earlier, more costly WCM projects. As a result, information and knowledge management professionals increasingly show an interest in open source WCM as a way of controlling software costs and increasing their access to product-specific expertise in the marketplace.
That's great: Enterprises should move to open-source web content management offerings. But which ones?
Out of the wide pool of open-source web content management projects (There are, quite literally, hundreds), Forrester says there are two to which CIOs and CTOs need to pay particular attention:
In answer to the question, "Why these two?" Forrester answers: Relevance. As Powers writes:
... Read moreActivision, best known for making innovative games like Guitar Hero, apparently also has a tendency to be innovative in its use of open-source technology. As announced today, Activision is using Alfresco for web and document management and collaboration. On the web aspect:
Activision is using the innovative Alfresco Web Content Management (WCM) application to manage content for a series of new interactive customer Web portals, each centered on one of the company's major video game franchises. These 40 micro-sites, in six different languages, will provide a personalized one-to-one Web experience that lets more than 5 million video gamers test games and offer feedback, receive special pre-launch perks and information, and communicate interactively.
As an Alfresco employee, I was pretty excited to be able to work with Activision on this. It's a good example of a partnership between vendor and customer. (At least, I think that's what it's called when I field calls from Activision at 11:30 PM.... :-)
It's very cool to see Dries Buytaert, co-founder of Acquia and founder of Drupal, listed on Businessweek's list of the world's top technology entrepreneurs. The story of Drupal - started by Dries in his spare time - is amazing, and testifies to the power of open source.
Great work, Dries. You deserve it.
(Credit:
Acquia)
What do you do with 2,000,000 downloads and a 100% growth rate? With 240,000 members of your community and 900-plus developers (a number that doubled in 2007)?
You'd start Acquia, that's what you'd do. Or, at least, that's what North Bridge Venture Partners did, and the company looks to have a huge opportunity before it. I spent some time with Jeff Whatcott, vice president of Marketing at Acquia, to get more detail on the company and its launch of its products.
First off, however, I just had to know:
Does Acquia compete with Microsoft Sharepoint?
This is bigger than Sharepoint. Sharepoint is primarily behind-the-firewall collaboration. Drupal can be used for this, but Drupal's real sweet spot today is outside-the-firewall social publishing, or collaboration.
... Read more
CMS Watch's Kas Thomas is reporting that the US Treasury is asking to bump up its content management budget from $16.9 million to $28.2 million. Kas further notes that the budget is for commercial off-the-shelf software not consulting bloatware.
It also likely means no open-source software (Alfresco, Drupal, etc.), which is the only way that the Treasury could manage to waste tens of millions of dollars on a $1 million (or so) problem. Other departments within the US federal government (US military, most notably) are weaning themselves from the proprietary nipple, as the federal IT spending report shows. But not the Treasury.
This isn't sour grapes: A wide range of US federal agencies already use open-source enterprise content management software (and other open-source software), including Alfresco. Rather, it's the same song that I've sung before about other wasteful government spending on proprietary bloatware. Governments shouldn't overspend on technology that locks citizen data into proprietary, private-sector software companies. Period.
... Read more
