Optaros just published an Open Source RIA Frontend for Alfresco ECM, DoCASU 1.0 under GPL. This once again highlights some of the great advantages of Open Source software.
Open Source software has many advantages compared to proprietary alternatives. The fact that the source code is open might often not even be the most relevant driver. Often a much more relevant benefit of modern open source technologies is their componentized nature and the ability to access functions and services through open APIs (application programming interfaces). This allows to focus development efforts on what is most important for the usage of the application – the user interface – for example. With DoCASU 1.0, Optaros has developed and published a user interface framework for Alfresco deployments as an open source project.  The project will help users assimilate Alfresco’s enterprise content management systems.
As a platinum partner of Alfresco, Optaros has successfully deployed numerous content management systems for clients, realizing a common need to create a customized user experience.  DoCASU 1.0 leverages the understanding gained from corporate user requirements and utilizes Rich Internet Application technologies such as the ExtJS AJAX framework. DocASU 1.0 is not intended to replace the already existing Alfresco web user interface, but rather offer an alternative for users who require a limited set of features and profit from simplicity and ease of use. Already today thousands of users at NXP, a top 10 semiconductor company founded by Philips, are enjoying the user friendly frontend solution.
DoCASU is a showcase of what can be done on top of Alfresco’s Web Script approach with state of the art RIA technologies. Developers can take DoCASU as a start for even more comprehensive user interfaces, purpose built frontends or just as the base for learning on how to build on top of the Web Scripts. Optaros has deployed DoCASU 1.0 internally and continues to use it in client projects.
DoCASU 1.0 is available as open source under GPL v3 and can be downloaded here. The solution currently offers the typical features that document management users regularly need.  Additional key features expected soon include a “drop zone” for dragging and dropping files onto the desktop, tabbed navigation, configurable skins, usability improvements and more.  To learn more about DoCASU 1.0, please visit code.optaros.com.

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During the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, I interviewed Bob Bickel (Ringside Networks), John Newton (Alfresco), and Jeff Whatcott (Acquia) about the relationships between open source, innovation, and enterprise 2.0.

First, Bob Bickel, currently CEO at Ringside Networks:

Second, John Newton, currently CTO and Chairman at Alfresco:

Finally, Jeff Whatcott of Acquia (commercial enterprise supporting the Drupal project):

As all three interviews amply demonstrate, open source is driving innovation in the Enterprise 2.0 space as in the Web 2.0 space.

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Stephen Powers of Forrester Research recently released a report identifying Alfresco and Drupal as the two open source content management platforms to which enterprises should pay the most attention. Specifically, the report claims that “enterprises interested in open source should keep an eye on two offerings — Alfresco Software and Drupal.” (Also check out Matt Asay’s coverage of the report for CNet).

I couldn’t agree more - though I wish the report had come out a few weeks ago. It would have made for a good introduction to the panel on Open Source Platforms which I moderated at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. The panelists were:

(more…)

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I just stumbled over an article in CIO.COM written by Esther Schindler. Based on the statistics published, 53% of the participants are using Open Source applications in their organization today, an additional 10 percent are planning to do so in the next year. Nearly half (44%) stated that Open Source solution are considered equally with proprietary solutions during the acquisition process. Of course operating systems and web server are always popular but more interesting is that 45% are using desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org and 29% use Open Source Enterprise applications. In general Open Source technologies are gaining confidence. Reasons for picking Open Source are primarly of financial nature (56%), but flexibility is catching up with 32%, access to the source code is ramping up to 30%. Looking at the barriers product support concerns are raised by 45%, awareness/knowledge of available solutions comes up second with 29%. And this is where our Enterprise Open Source Directory comes into play. Good! Other barriers mentioned with lower priority are security concerns, lack of management support and licensing/legal questions, that clearly seen less of an issue compared with some years ago.

So, we didn’t really need another survey to be convinced, but it’s a good sign that enterprises using Open Source are on the right track.

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Magento, the new open source ecommerce platform,  is a promising new entrant that should be evaluated against OFBiz and osCommerce. The Magento project is lead by Verian Technologies, a consulting firm that worked with osCommerce and then decided they could do better by taking their experience and creating a new ecommerce platform.

As Adam Michelson writes in his blog post on the Optaros website, Magento is entering a crowded space of offerings that promise a better ecommerce Web storefront. Magento is betting that even though the ecommerce storefront is a relatively mature space, that it is still an underserved market. They may be correct as there does seem to be a good amount of interest for their production release. The biggest differentiator for Magento from most of its storefront competition is that it is an open source solution offered under the Open Software License (OSL 3.0). There are only a few other well known open source web storefronts, OFBiz and osCommerce being the most well known. OFBiz is more of a framework, and offers capabilities beyond the ecommerce storefront. osCommerce is more focused on ecommerce functionality. Magento’s heritage is osCommerce, so it has an ecommerce storefront and merchandizing focus as well.

Magento is in large part a fresh-start to osCommerce. Magento is composed of a team that knows ecommerce very well, and they have created a solid set of ecommerce capability. Magento’s goal is to be less complex than osCommerce, as osCommerce has grown into a somewhat complex collection of offerings. Of course Magento is much more immature at this point, with far fewer adjunct projects than osCommerce. Magento also offers professional support for customers and a partnership program for integrators. Magento will feel more like a company that has an open source offering as opposed to osCommerce which is more of a pure-play open source community. Magento is also likely to keep the code base under their control, while contributors to the osCommerce platform are from a several corporations including PayPal and Amazon.

Magento offers similar technology as osCommerce as they are both written in PHP. But architecturally Magento is more of a collection of services than osCommerce. In this way, even though Magento is written in PHP and OFBiz is Java, Magento is architecturally more like OFBiz than osCommerce. Magento and OFBiz share a similar architectural approach of being constructed from a collection of underlying services. This allows to leverage the individual services and assemble them to the specific solution you need. In comparison, osCommerce is more of a package-type implementation, and OFBiz allows a bit more assemble. Magento can be deployed as a package for sure, but the core architecture also allows for assembly as well as they have an underlying services model.

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Open Source has been here for quite some time and large and smaller enterprises have learned to deal with it. With developing commercial open source business models and a shake out of who the winners in each category are, software evaluation and acquisition has become easier and less risky. Are you looking for a database? Then typically your choice will be MySQL. An application server? Sure, JBoss should be a safe bet. Business intelligence? Pentaho or Jasper will be the answer. For document management you probably are going to select Alfresco. And the list goes on. Only in a few domains there are many or no clear leaders. The exception is certainly Content Management where some 2’000 plus technologies fight for users, but even there the short list can easily be reduced to 5-8 players and if programming language is a criteria you probably don’t need to look at more than 3. Is Customer Relationship Management different in this aspect? Well, at first sight SugarCRM seems to be the clear leader and it certainly has more downloads and paying customers than most other CRM tools out there. But it caters more for small and midrange customers or for departmental applications than for the large enterprise. And the fact that it is PHP based limits its use in many strongly Java focused IT departments.

There is clearly room for a Java based componentized CRM platform that can be integrated with existing CRM applications as easy as used stand alone. It needs to support open standards and allow for low effort configuration and customizations while still remaining upgradeable. And it needs to be able to compete with the Siebels and SAPs of this world, not in terms of functional richness as nobody can consume all what Siebel is offering, but in terms of being extendable and customizable. While there are Java based CRM technologies out there such as Adempiere, Compiere or OpenCRX none of them is really state-of-the-art in many aspects, be it concerning the integration of the online channel, the features for campaign management and marketing analytics/automation or the quality and adaptability of their frontends. They are not customizable to the extent Enterprises need it. And they have in common that they are not componentized, you either use the whole thing or you take another. And finally the lack the ease of use and low effort install approach that is needed to be effective as an open source vendor. So, who will take this challenge and is there a business case for the “Alfresco” of CRM? I strongly believe so and I can guarantee that VCs do so too if the right team comes with the right plan and ideally at least half of the technology already built. And what has been said is at as well true for the even larger ERP domain.

But remember, commercial open source is at least as much about online marketing and highly efficient and effective sales processes than about software.

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Content Management is a very popular category in the open source ecosystem. There are more than 2’000 open source technologies out there to handle, manage and distribute content. So why would we need any of the 200 new ones published over the last six months?

Some of the existing 2′000+ solutions are very well known. The most popular and most widely used technologies include: Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal, eZ publish, MediaWiki, openCMS, Plone, Typo3, WordPress and XOOPS. They all have in common that they are being downloaded 1’000 plus times per day, have gathered substantial communities, exist since 5-10 years (exception is “newcomer” Alfresco with only 3 years of existence). You could say there’s no reason to look further. These offerings cover all what an enterprise might need in terms of content management, if one can’t do the job the other will.

So what’s the use for the other 1’990+ solutions and frameworks? And why have open source communities and contributors added more than 200 additional open source content management technologies during the last 6 months? It will certainly not be easy for them to be successful in the already crowded market. They don’t differentiate very much on technology (more than 70% are based on PHP) and they follow common standards for licensing (more than 80% are GPL). They have been created by small and very small communities (more than 80% of the new open source cms have less than three contributors) and their biggest differentiator may be their creative names such as Moon Dragon CMS, Yanel, Luftguitar CMS, Adapt CMS Lite, Yanel or Utopia CMS. Creativity allone will though not make them a winner.

What would we expect from new content management system? We want omponentized platforms, modularized functionalities, aherence to open standard, sophisticated and easy-to-use inline editing, support for state of the art web technologies (such as Ajax, Flash, multi-media), syndication and widgets and a service oriented access. And solutions should be configurable but still easy to handle and manage. That’s probably more than what small 1-2 person team can build in a few weeks. So let’s stick with the top players again who aren’t fully able to cover these things neither? Maybe not, or at least not always.

What is nice in open source is that users can evaluate technologies and pick the one that supports their specific needs the best. In many cases this can be a fairly specialized application and often only a limited scope of functionalities is needed. New entrants have the opportunity to come with advanced architecture concepts, lightweight implementation approaches and state of the art integration of the latest standards. So why not look again at some of the newer technologies? And who knows maybe in a couple of years Luftguitar CMS, Yanel or any other of the new kids on the block from now will be found in enterprise application stacks as often as Alfresco or Drupal today.

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Was it pressure from the EU, a ploy to encourage ISO adoption of MS-friendly document formats or maybe, just maybe, the “disruption” created by enterprise adoption of open source? Whatever the reasons, Microsoft today announced it is:

“implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.”

The products include:

“Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products.”

As Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie put it in the press release: “By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers.”

According to Matt Aslett of The 451 Group, what it really means is this:

“It’s an acknowledgment that in today’s world, many more flowers bloom when platform companies make their APIs completely open for developers to write to, a la Google and MSFT’s recent investee, Facebook. This is yet another thing Google has taught the largest software company in the world. It appears on the face of it that Microsoft now intends to live by the merit of its products, rather than rely on lock-in.”

Of course, it could also be just a “Good Steve Day,” according to ZDNet’s Open Source blog:

“Is this an honest change of policy, or is this just a bow to political pressure, pressure which lobbying and campaign contributions might some day remove?”

Speaking for myself, I tend to agree with Jay Lyman at The 451 Group, who calls this “Open source disruption realized“:

“This is just another case of companies coming around to market realities. Look at it like the Internet. Did the Internet suffer when Microsoft finally came around and began supporting and focusing on really working with it? Hardly. The companies that have already focused on the enterprise potential and opportunities for open source software retain their lead. They may have to work harder to maintain it, but that is a good thing, both for users and for open source.”

Is a more open Microsoft a good thing? Is it an open door to better interoperability or an open jaw to swallow open source competitors? Post your comments below?

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Drupal, the popular open source enterprise CMS, released version 6.0 last Wednesday. With a large and active developer and user community, there’s a wealth of information available on new features and other enhancements, including:

• New features in Drupal 6.0 screencast
• Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s announcement blog post
• The project download page
• Plus a wealth of support resources

Drupal has been put to work on sites ranging from Fast Company and Amnesty International to Popular Science and The Onion. EOS Directory sponsor Optaros has used Drupal in a number of solutions including the Chicago Public Radio site Vocalo. Read the case study here and post your comments about the new version.

Update:

Drupal users and others can check out Drupalcon Boston (US) 2008 Monday, March 3 through Thursday, March 6 at the Boston Convention and Expo Center.

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Here’s a quick roundup of recent posts on the spate of open source projects acquired by commercial software companies.

• Novell acquires SiteScape - what took you so long? (451 CAOS Theory)
• Sun Champions Developers, Disruption Of Big Software Suppliers (InformationWeek)

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