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?"
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:4, Interesting)
Our company is even worse than that - we have shown them the cost savings of switching from Microsoft Office (Standard) to Open Office, demo'd the interoperability and the ease of switching, but because it's not Microsoft they just can't consider it "reliable".
It makes me want to rip my hair out. Then glue it on their faces as silly mustaches. Point is it makes me have crazy thoughts.
Confluence (Score:3, Interesting)
Confluence integrates with Jira. I like and can't argue against it.
I've never used Plone, but as the old cliché goes, best tool for the job.
K.I.S.S of death (Score:2, Interesting)
What never gets added is that people have gotten fired for going above and beyond to advocate for FOSS and then got fired when there was a show-stopping problem (which can happen no matter what new scheme you bring in).
FOSS has it's time and place, but *you* sticking your neck out trying to jam in FOSS into an environment that is not culturally ready for it is just asking for being the center of a CYA shitstorm.
I'm guessing that a bunch of people on slashdot have been severely stung from drinking the kool-aid. It hurts the company, the boob that was a advocate instead of a advisor, and most of all it hurts FOSS.
Don't push, FOSS will get there on it's own schedule.
Confluence is better (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Written in Java, which means you're more likely to have on-site language expertise in case something goes seriously awry (you get the source when you buy a license).
2. Lots of support available, as it's the most popular enterprise wiki system.
3. Integrates with SharePoint, which for many places is a must-have.
Basically, Atlassian focuses on the enterprise market, and it shows. Best tool for the job, etc.
Re:Feature Comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
First, simply walking down a checklist tells you nothing about how WELL those features are implemented.
Second, it appears that the Confluence entry is only about 58% complete. Thus, many of the comparisons made assume that Plone wins by default.
Re:Wrong order (Score:4, Interesting)
This is right on the mark. As an employee, you're ethically obligated to help the company make the best decision for the company. It's not your place to decide to promote open source for the sake of open source.
There are a lot - a lot - of people who feel that Free Software is inherently superior to its proprietary cousins, and those people believe they're helping their company by advocating it.
Whether you agree with them is a different issue, of course. That doesn't change the fact that they're acting in their employer's best interests from their perspective.
Personally, after spending the last several years trying to help my company pry itself loose from the proprietary EOLed products it depends on, I'm very sympathetic to the idea that Free Software is inherently better. Unless a proprietary product is clearly, unarguably better suited to our needs, I'll support the Free alternative every time. From experience, I know which one will be easier to support (or migrate cleanly away from) 5 years down the road.
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:2, Interesting)
Better yet, tell them Plone comes from Oracle... :-)
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:4, Interesting)
Like all posts about Microsoft products vs. open-source products, this post (the one you're reading right now) and its parent boil down to anecdotal evidence and personal preference. So, with the understanding that this is my opinion and not the intentional start of a flame war, read on.
What exactly about Excel makes Calc look like a joke? My anecdotal experience is that it is at least twice as fast and I can find things in fairly logical places instead of a stupid ribbon. I use Calc for eve online industry calculations, which mirror fairly closely the actual data gathering, analysis, and projection work of a real business. What's your anecdotal experience?
If your people needed training to switch from Microsoft Office to Open Office, then they also needed training to be able to use the present version of Microsoft Office vs. the previous version of Microsoft Office, which is still nothing compared to the training costs of Vista/Win7.
Two other things to consider: if you have the latest and greatest MS product, you'll be saving in a format that only that version can read (at first, anyway). If you have the latest and greatest Open Office, you'll be saving in a format that both Open Office and Microsoft Office (any fairly recent version) can read. When you switch up with MS, you'll have the inevitable horde of people saving in the new, incompatible format and customers who can't open their documents without paying the Microsoft upgrade tax.
Second, the site license is the real reason we still use Microsoft Office in business. Early adopters amongst customers or contractors will mean that someone in the enterprise needs to have the latest Microsoft offering to be able to read or convert their files. If one person needs it, why not several? If several people have it, we'd better do a site license 'cause the BSA swat team might show up for an audit. So, businesses talk themselves into the site license to avoid jackbooted thuggery. Once you have a site license, there's no reason to switch.
Besides, trying to force a switch to OO is pointless... roll it out alongside Microsoft Office and let the people with a clue get on with things while the rest lag behind.
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not really about reliability.
It's about philosophy. One of the unwritten qualifications for the upper echelons of corporate management is believing wholeheartedly that capitalist corporations are the most efficient way of producing the highest quality goods and services (and it should be pointed out that for many products, they're absolutely right). After all, if you didn't believe in corporations, why would you make the sacrifices necessary to get to an upper management position?
And here come a bunch of long-haired hippies who explain how their stuff is better. But it can't be, because it's not produced by a corporation. I mean, which car is more reliable, the old beat-up Thunderbird your mechanic brother-in-law tinkered with constantly, or the one just driven off the Mercedes parking lot? And then cognitive dissonance creeps in: If the hippies' stuff actually is better, then perhaps the corporation isn't always right, and perhaps the manager has wasted his better years in the office rather than spending quality time with his children.
Software is one of those strange products where "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" really works well, because there's tiny tiny costs (namely, downloading bandwidth) for having freeloaders. But for those who've bought completely into capitalism, they react about as well to this idea as a Unix geek would to converting their beloved webservers to run IIS.
Re:Wrong order (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Interesting)
That, combined with the fact that virtually all the document production of the department is lightly formatted near-plaintext technical documentation, with the occasional screenshot and hyperlink, also had a lot to do with making the pitch successful. Had we been 100% behind sharepoint at the time, it almost certainly would have failed. However, since we weren't putting too much effort into gettting the most out of any document management setup, I was able to sell the wiki(ended up being dokuwiki, I think) as a great "80/20 solution". Sharepoint would give you more features(and I freely acknowledged that); but required a greater level of work and buy-in than the department was giving it. The wiki would give us 80ish% of the benefits for 20% of the effort.
So far, that has been largely true. For a department of our size, the wiki lives on a tiny little VM, not consuming any CALs or licences or anything, gives us versioning and attribution for the mostly plaintext documentation/links/screenshots stuff, and supports links to an SMB share where we can store installers and documents that absolutely have to be in Word, and so forth.
Not quite as seamless; but it was fast, easy, and cheap. The fact that I could go from "nothing" to "full demo" in a little bit of spare time just helped drive that home.
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:2, Interesting)
To be even more fair it did in Excel 2007.
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:2, Interesting)
Tell them Open Office comes from Oracle.
honestly it has made things a little easier for me trying to get it in use - although the BIGEST hurdle is the lacking of a mail client/server combo that is comparable to outlook/exchange.
If you're looking for an Oracle solution, Oracle itself uses Oracle Beehive [oracle.com][free download] for email/calendaring/file sharing/conferencing/chat, with Thunderbird/Lightning or the included Zimbra web interface as the main clients. Any IMAP/CalDAV/WebDav/XMPP clients will work though. A single instance supports more than 100,000 accounts.
Re:Cost? (Score:3, Interesting)