Open-source vs. commercial grade Web content management

re: Open-source vs. commercial grade Web content management (follow-up to interview by Vanessa Voltolina of Folio Magazine)

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Vanessa Voltolina in her recent article on the merits of open-source and commercial-grade Web content management systems. I thought I would supplement that article with a more fleshed out list of pros and cons for each.

You might also catch Stephen Powers' new report on "The Four Decision Factors For Open Source Enterprise Content Management", for which I also had the pleasure of participating in an interview.

Commercial-grade Web Content Management systems:

Upgrade paths tested by a central company (supposedly)

Product lifecycles typically well documented, less amorphous

Centralized maintenance and on-demand support

QA process more polished/professional, regimented - not so in the past but more so now because some of the commercial vendors got horrible press for previous releases in previous years

Documented add-on/plugin rules/protocols - less spaghetti code or issues of contributors building components that can destabilize the core. Also, some of the vendors actually certify 3rd party plugins or those built by the end-users themselves, which is a nifty bonus.

1 neck to wring - accountability

Lower risk of product disappearance (example: KRANG initiative in the open-source world) - public companies expose their financials so you know where they stand in your vetting process. However, I note here that companies do retire code bases. For instance, OpenText will likely retire RedDot (a .NET/COM codebase) in 2010, having customers migrate to Vignette, which is a Java/J2EE code base. I'm wondering if they plan to pass the costs of that migration on to the end user...not sure that will go over well.

In general, the commercial vendors favor optimization/stability of their platforms OVER functionality, which isn't a bad thing

Commercial products generally scale better than those in open-source, although the gap is closing

There is generally much better documentation on commercial products, although not always so - knowledge bases are generally distributed all across the Web for open-source projects

Generally standard training and certification programs by the vendor to on-board end user staff resources on the product (however products can be complex to implement, which might neutralize this 'strength')

Given that some of the commercial products have been on the market a very long time, there is potential for a more mature product (although over time this will be a moot point, since some of the open-source projects are now entering their 2nd decade, hard to imagine as that may be)

The open-source culture can be antagonistic (this is MY product, you're just leeching on my work). Value assignation is vague in the open-source world. Less so in a proprietary environment where the vendors (hopefully) will go out of their way to please the customer and grow their market share. This is NOT uniformly true.

Many commercial vendors establish strategic alliances with other product vendors (example video content distribution, search, analytics, etc) to make it easier for the end user to implement solutions. In the open-source world, those kinds of connections happen serendipitously based upon implementations by organizations or their integrators. Thus, the fruits of those integrations may not be readily available in the marketplace.

Some commercial vendors also have integrated products (digital asset management, multi-channel, records management, search, document management, workflow, etc), which larger enterprises may prefer so as to reduce or eliminate enterprise application integration challenges. However, the breadth of a vendor's product line does not necessarily mean that the quality of the products are uniformly good or even that they are well-integrated.

Oftentimes it can be easier to sell a proprietary product to upper management of a large enterprise for risk mitigation

It can oftentimes be easier to do due diligence on a proprietary system than an open-source one, particularly since there are pre-sales engineers at those companies whose jobs it is to go deep into the technical/architectural underpinnings of the product. With open-source, you often have to do the evaluation yourself.

Open source Web content management

Top consideration: Cost is unbeatable. That charge we hear around the Internet that open-source Web CMS isn't really less expensive is sheer nonsense. For companies that are stretching the dollar or who have functional requirements that match the features of an open-source Web CMS, this just has to be the way to go.

In the open-source world, innovation is distributed over vast networks - faster ingenuity and invention. There is no way that any product vendor could possibly compete in resources with the thousands of contributors to some of the most popular open-source projects like Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, Plone and the like. However, this invention is not without risk, since contributions to a project could destabilize the core, conflict with each other, or be poorly coded.

Popular open-source products have many consulting resources on the market. Contrast that with the fact that proprietary vendor pools of resources are VERY low. Hence, it can be very expensive to hire talented resources to implement a commerical Web CMS, and it can also lead to a possibly unhealthy reliance on the product vendor or a 3rd party consulting firm (or even a couple of internal developers that begin to realize their value in a scarce supply market). However, the issue with the large supply of open-source developers is that many are itinerant, moving from project to project. This is being recently addressed by consulting companies like DPCI that offer the consistent technical/development support on both open source and commercial WebCMS products.

Open-source Web CMS is generally quite rapid to deploy

One downside of open-source WebCMS is that some of the projects pack a great deal of functionality into the solution, but do so OVER optimization (double-edged sword). This is often the opposite problem to that of the commercial vendors.

The culture of proprietary systems can be very arrogant (only WE can do the work, everyone else will yield inferior results). The open-source culture generally is that ANYBODY can do the implementation (but should contribute back). That very same open-source culture actually can cause problems since quite frequently companies DO implement the solutions themselves or with integrators/development shops that may not fully understand the particular project. That can lead to failed or unstable implementations, which can create bad press for any open-source project.

In my opinion, it can generally be a bit easier to understand total costs with an open-source Web content management system than proprietary (not on licensing costs but on services). Quite often the commercial vendors just sell the software without going into details on implementation costs. This almost always leaves the new customer in a 'shock and awe' state when they realize they may be spending 1-5x the costs of the software itself.

The overall message here in this fairly unstructured list of pros and cons is that if you're going to pick a proprietary system over an open-source one, make sure that you build into your selection process that the strengths of either should be IN that product you pick. Don't assume that you'll be getting all the benefits of a commercial product that I specify above just because its commercial, and vice versa.

And good luck. I'll welcome feedback as usual...

Posted at 04:56 pm by Joseph Bachana

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