Convincing Your Employer To Go With FOSS? 369
mark72005 writes "My employer is currently looking at adopting a content management system for use by our technical support staff (primarily first-line end user support, but hopefully it will include deeper levels of support personnel eventually). The candidates are currently Plone (OSS) and Confluence (proprietary, closed-source). For those with experience in each, what arguments in favor of Plone could be made to managers more interested in pragmatism than idealism?"
Confluence did not impress me (Score:5, Informative)
I've used TWiki (OSS, all Perl IIRC and aimed at corporate usage) at one job and Confluence at another but not Plone. Confluence is good for non-technical people because it has a pretty good wysiwig editor, but its search was simply wretched. I think we had a lot of 'lost' knowledge in the Confluence DB because nobody knew it was there and the obvious searches didn't show it - I would come across nuggets now and then. If you have the discipline to build index pages, it's probably a good choice if you have a lot of non-engineer type people.
TWiki (and this was a number of years ago so it may have improved) was almost the reverse. Good search, good architecture for plugins, but no wysiwyg so non-technical contributors had trouble with it. They were writing a wysiwyg plugin so that may have now arrived. It was easy to maintain and of the two I would say I like it better.
Liferay (Score:4, Informative)
FLOSS weekly 137 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Count the minutes till the collapse (Score:4, Informative)
That would be a totally coherent or relevant comment in an alternate universe where the question had to do with a replacement for MS Word. Please tell us how you get to that universe, so we can loot their alternate technology to improve our own.
In short, "let's say an open office variant" is a pure non-sequitur, because "competition for MS Word" is a field where compatibility is widely imagined to be important. (Note: I've had a lot of trouble with compatibility between MS Word and MS Word -- in fact, more than I've had between MS Word and OpenOffice.) We're talking about a tool for internal use, at which point, all that matters is its compatibility with itself -- it's not something that other people send you stuff for. And, even if it were, the chances that the commercial one is an effective monopoly aren't high.
MS Word is really a very special case, and no example based on it is likely to be relevant to other cases.
FWIW, we use Foswiki at work these days, I think, and we're pretty happy with it. Search is sorta frustrating, though -- it really does need someone keeping it maintained.
Confluence is Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
do you want a CMS, or a wiki? (Score:5, Informative)
Plone is a CMS, Confluence is a wiki. Incedentally, both products are quite good. I used Confluence at a previous job and it is a very nice wiki. We used it because of it's tight integration with Jira, an issue tracking system by the same software vendor.
Re:Confluence (Score:4, Informative)
Also, strictly speaking, Confluence IS open source, it's just not FOSS. You get access to the source code with your license, and as long as you keep your license up to date, you can download the source for the latest version at any time. If at some point you decide not to pay for support, their license allows you to keep working with what you have, binary or source. I think Atlassian as a company have taken a very enlightened approach to this issue, and I have no qualms in paying for their excellent software. Most of the issues I would have with closed source proprietary solutions are not an issue. You are free to tinker, just not redistribute, and they give you the insurance policy, in source code, that you can keep going should there ever be an issue with them as a company.
Re:Confluence did not impress me (Score:3, Informative)
Yes the search sucks. You can use tagging to sort out things to some extent but good organization is key.
One "benefit" is that it can import from several other wiki solutions including Mediawiki which was our old solution. While the importer works, formatting is trashed so you pretty much have to have someone go and clean up after it.
FSF has a great page of testimonies (Score:4, Informative)
This gets much less attention than it deserves:
http://www.fsf.org/working-together/whos-using-free-software [fsf.org]
Testimonies from Cern, NYSE, the EU, Wikipedia, and the US Department of Defense, plus another page of testimonies from individuals:
http://www.fsf.org/working-together/profiles/meet-the-free-software-community [fsf.org]
Re:Confluence did not impress me (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cost? (Score:3, Informative)
Mod parent up!
This strikes me as genuinely useful advice.
Re:Stallman's answer (Score:5, Informative)
Convincing Your Employer To Go With Plone? (Score:3, Informative)
Your real question is:
Convincing Your Employer To Go With Plone?
The answer to this depends on how good your organization is with Zope/Python. If you have onsite developers with Zope knowledge (who can support Plone), Plone is a no-brainer. And if you have developers familiar with other OOS software like Java, you have plenty of other products to choose from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Open_source_content_management_systems [wikipedia.org]
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ [cmsmatrix.org]
If you don't have any onsite development staff, the value proposition of OSS/Plone goes down because you will presumably have to hire someone to run it.
Frankly, that's what I would stress. If this is a large enough project you're going to have to hire someone to run it anyway. You can save on software costs by hiring someone who knows Plone.
If you're not hiring new staff it boils down to who within your organization is running the CMS and what THEY want. Most other considerations are relatively trivial. The more "out of the box" they need the software to be, the more that leans towards a proprietary solution. They might also want to be able to have a vendor to complain to and to provide direct support, again, proprietary has an edge here.
Popularity also factors in. I don't really know how popular Plone is, but Confluence is really popular. That means there will be lots of online resources (forums, FAQs, etc.) for Confluence that you might not find for Plone.
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:2, Informative)
Ah, The hippie-commie argument about Linux/FOSS (even free stuff can "make" money.)
Just send these to the upper management types and tell them to open up thier WSJ paper and look in the finance section. (Linux "is" making money)
GOOG
IBM
RHT
ORCL
They may not know as much about RedHat or Oracle, but you would have to be living in a cave for 20 Years not to know who Google is and they Damn sure know who IBM is. Hell as far as the hippie crowds go tell them to look at Apple (APPL) which is starting to surpass Microsoft. (Even Hippies are greedy capitalists.)
FOSS is actually a prime example of how Free-Market capitalism is "supposed" to work, Undercut the competition and create a better product for less. Seems that free can undercut the big boys and make money. (win-win)
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:2, Informative)
It's probably best not to try and deploy it as a replacement, but as a supplement.
For a several years now we would install it and have users use it turn their .doc files into .pdf (instead of buying $150 Adobe Pro.) We have added it as part of our default image for the last 3 years (now Office 2007 Pro. % OO 3.x)
There are some features that we have used in OO for auto-document creation from a SQL Database (used it to pull fields from a system and autocreate 1000's of cards pre-printed with Names and other info to reduce the amount that had to be filled in later, Could not find anything like this in Word 2002/2003 (have not tried in 2007) and using Access forms just looked horrible and would never come out right but OO Writer did this from a blank document to a template to an exported .pdf ready to print in minutes.
It's there and every now and then it is able to actually fix MS documents that hang while loading, i.e. if a user created a file from a corrupted template that was originally in an OLD outdated network share years ago and the file still has it referenced somehow, now every time a file created from that template is opened (after the server the share was on died) it times out trying to open the old UNC location. we could find no way to fix this within office, but found that by opening it OO it would load immediately so they opened then re-saved them and now Office has no issue with them.
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cost (Score:1, Informative)
I agree, Plone while free is not something you want students to setup or create any sort of application with. I should know I was a student setting up and creating an application for what essentially was a podcasting art website (the site never go off the ground as far as i know.
As a student it was my year long project to complete this site (with a group of others), we did all the good things, project management docs. Requirement docs, but we where told to use Plone. None of us had ever used Plone, it took about 3 months to understand what was going on and another 3 months to become "competent" modifying Plone.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Plone. I actually ended up really liking it, but we ended up running out of time as we couldn't learn fast enough. And it is fairly easy to brick a Plone website by "accidentally" deleting the wrong files. (or maybe i'm a little dumb).
Go-oo.org (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cost? (Score:3, Informative)
It's definitely not cost.
In Corporate IT budget terms, Confluence is free. A manager can purchase a couple hundred users worth of licenses on the corporate credit card. And it's supported. Hell, that's pretty much the Atlassian model. Stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap, and make 'em pretty.
I think the parent is dead on. If you have your heart set on plone (I've used it, it's acceptable - won't bring many tears of sorrow or joy) the parent is right. Just do it. If asked to compare to confluence, you want to find some practical reason Confluence is worse - some security thing would be ideal - but end up with a "look, this is easy, it's done, and it's free" kind of play. "We could do Confluence, but it does cost some money and it's pretty much the same thing. I don't see a compelling reason to pay for it."
However, if your boss really values support (a "throat to choke") you'll want to know what it'll cost to pay someone to provide you a Plone support contract. Plone.net has some providers listed. In the US, I'd start with http://www.enfoldsystems.com/ [enfoldsystems.com] .