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?"
It's tougher than you think... (Score:5, Insightful)
My problem has been convincing them that they con't just pass of the cost of Windows to the customer. They like the fact that they can hire 3-4 MCSEs for the cost of one good Unix admin, but they don't realize that the Unix admin can set things up so that maintenance is much easier.
Windows is ingrained in business culture here, for the most part.
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.
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell them Open Office comes from Oracle.
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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.
I'll bash MS with everyone else - but outlook/exchange/project just don't have good oss/gnu replacements
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You say that like it's a good thing.
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone knows that oracle makes software that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars...
so it has to be good, right?
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Sure, just as politicians get a lot of money because they always know what they're doing.
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:5, Insightful)
You say that like it's a good thing.
To the people who make decisions, it is.
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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".
Consider sneaking into the executive offices after hours and replacing the Microsoft Office adverts inside their copy of CIO with ones for Open Office. :)
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As to liability, that is a real concern when you use F
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm gonna get a karma beating for saying this, but sadly, Open Office isn't entirely reliable. Yes, it works well for smaller projects, is free, cross platform, and mostly compatible with MS office.
But there are.... issues. Like the autonumbering makes you want to axe murder somebody. Spacing in Impress has a beeeelion little weirds.
And... get this! The spreadsheet can't have more than 65535 rows! Here it is, 2010 and I have a roaring, quadcore laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a TB hard drive, and I'm limited to an architecture that was considered limiting 10 or more hardware generations ago?!?
OoO is sadly just not as good, and it isn't until you lose 100,000 rows of financial data that you start to appreciate just how bad this actually is. (Which has never happened to me but not everybody is as anally retentive about backups as I am)
I really wish I were an astrotufing MS shill, but I'm a Linux nerd with more than a decade as such...(check my UID)
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:5, Insightful)
and to be even fairer than that - if you actually run into that limitation, if you have a spreadsheet with anywhere near 65K rows then UR DOING IT WRONG.
whatever it is you are doing, there are *far* better ways of doing it than with a spreadsheet.
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I'm not sure what *far* better way you envision.
Accountants, those in finance, etc.. generally do not have any computer skills outside of Excel. They routinely work with large data sets. I remember finance dept. folks working around the 65k limit by having 65k rows per tab, and then combining calculations on the rows on a final tab.
The amount of excel equations, nesting, and loops was actually pretty impressive for having no programming experience. When I supported those types of workers, I remember havi
Go-oo.org (Score:3, Informative)
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:It's tougher than you think... (Score:5, Insightful)
- Dan.
Re:It's tougher than you think... (Score:4, Insightful)
I do actually. I Expect the Next 3 versions of Open Office to work a lot more seemlessly than the past 3 versions of Microsoft Office.
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.
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My problem has been convincing them that they con't just pass of the cost of Windows to the customer. They like the fact that they can hire 3-4 MCSEs for the cost of one good Unix admin, but they don't realize that the Unix admin can set things up so that maintenance is much easier
That kind of math is pretty narrow minded, if you think about it. The whole world has become a better place because of computers, hasn't it? The "customers" for a lot of businesses are just ordinary people, and as such rely on Wi
Cost (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Plone is only "free" in software. In my experience with open source CMSs -- Plone, Typo3, Drupal, Joomla -- you get best results by paying an expert to program and set it up initially to your specs. It looks better, runs smoother, etc.
I'm not that expert, by the way. I've just worked on projects that lacked an expert, and projects that had one, and the difference in result was night and day. The expertly-configured sites ran much better.
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.
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I *love* FLOSS software but Confluence is the best overall Wiki, period..
OTOH, the comment above about the search being screwed up is, unfortunately, mostly true.. ATLASSIAN, FIX THIS!
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Yes the search sucks. You can use tagging to sort out things to some extent but good organi
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We use TWiki here and it does come with a visual editor which the non-technical types can use.
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It does. Unfortunately for anything non-trivial, you need to install plugins. And plugins aren't generally integrated with the WYSIWYG interface, so you still wind up alienating non-technical people.
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I recently deployed a FOSWiki setup for our group. It is considerably more refined than the TWiki version I messed with several years ago.
Stallman's answer (Score:5, Funny)
I once asked Richard Stallman how to convince my school to go with FOSS instead of Windows, since most of our CS lab was on Windows.
His reply: "Defenestration! Throw Windows out of the computer, or throw the computer out the window!"
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Re:Stallman's answer (Score:4, Insightful)
> Both are unhinged advocates for changes that will NEVER happen without first finding a genie.
Stallman's changes are already happening and as far as I know he has no access to a genie. If he had a genie he'd share it.
Re:Stallman's answer (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, the only thing that separates Richard Stallman from the bum that lives under a bridge near my home and rants incoherently at strangers is that Stallman has the ability to code.
How someone's personality disorder became a religion is beyond me. Oh, wait - *All* religions start that way.
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> As far as I can tell, the only thing that separates Richard Stallman from the bum that lives under a bridge near my home and rants
> incoherently at strangers is that Stallman has the ability to code.
You'd be surprised. I got into an argument with a bum under a bridge once about using sbcl instead of clisp. It seemed that decent multi-threading support wasn't important to him at the moment. Are you sure the incoherent ranting isn't just instruction mnemonics?
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Stallman is the Michael Savage of software. He seems reasonable until you hear him speak or read his writings.
Stallman is utterly unreasonable. He's also correct pretty much every time he predicts something. I wish the world had a few more unreasonable visionaries who were unwilling to compromise on their goals to make this a better place.
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Stallman is the Michael Savage of software. He seems reasonable until you hear him speak or read his writings.
Stallman is utterly unreasonable. He's also correct pretty much every time he predicts something. I wish the world had a few more unreasonable visionaries who were unwilling to compromise on their goals to make this a better place.
I just wish the ones we have would learn effective communication skills.
Re:Stallman's answer (Score:5, Informative)
Liferay (Score:4, Informative)
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Isn't Liferay a "portlet" system? It has a rich feature set, but it's also complicated. If all they need is a wiki, I wouldn't recommend Liferay.
Wrong order (Score:5, Insightful)
You've obviously decided which piece of software you want to recommend even though the only reason you can think of to recommend it is that it is FOSS? If the open software isn't as good it just isn't as good; just because it's FOSS doesn't mean that it is the be all and end all to solve your problems. Compare features, stability, cost, and support; if your boss is actively against FOSS make a point to explain it's advantages (and disadvantages if you want to be fair) and leave the decision to him. After all, it's entirely possible that the closed, proprietary solution fits your situation better; basically, its dishonest to make your decision and then go digging specifically for evidence to support that decision.
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Mod parent up.
I'd even go so far as to suggest FOSS is the wrong solution for many people -- not because it's FOSS, but because its feature list does not sufficiently meet the project requirements. Some years back, an organization I worked for did a kind of CMS duel between a few FOSS packages and a few commercial packages. One of the commercial packages (Cascade) came out far, far ahead in terms of meeting all the "needs" and "wants" on our project checklist. No FOSS package came close. A local develo
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But if the two are essentially the same as far as features are concerned, most bosses will default to the commercial version and will need to be convinced that the open software is just as good an option. That could be the case here; either would do the job so why not go with FOSS?
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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.
This doesn't mean that open source is bad. You (and your manager) should objectively identify the advantages and disadvantages of each solution.
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:Wrong order (Score:5, Insightful)
After that, IF the OSS product is superior and they're scared of the OSS boogieman enough to go with an inferior product after you've clearly outlined everything, you probably aren't going to be able to change their mind.
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Re:Wrong order (Score:4, Insightful)
Hear hear!
For those with experience in each, what argument could be made in favor of Plone to managers interested in pragmatism rather than idealism?
If the questioner doesn't actually already have some compelling arguments in favor of this particular solution, then he is making his choice based on idealism instead of pragmatism.
Do an honest evaluation based on criteria that are important to your organization (including upfront cost, ongoing support, etc) and see what wins. Use a scoring spreadsheet or a decision making tool. You may decide that "open source vs. closed source" counts for 5% of your overall evaluation grade. Adherence to functional requirements may count for another 30%. NFR a further 15%. Whatever. That will produce your compelling arguments in favor of the better tool, and in an open, honest, and transparent manner.
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You've obviously decided which piece of software you want to recommend even though the only reason you can think of to recommend it is that it is FOSS?
Keep in mind that the blade cuts in both directions. There's this tenancy to paint any FOSS advocate as a zealot and the Proprietary side as "best tool for the job" pragmatists. However, there is zealotry to be found in the proprietary world as well to include strong biases and ignorance towards OSS products. You touched on this with noting "if your boss is actively against FOSS" but I think the point is worth stressing.
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To be fair, closed source has all the disadvantages and no advantages over FOSS.
A good choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A good choice (Score:4, Insightful)
No they don't. We use a proprietary, closed source "ticket management system" for lack of a better word. This thing is horrid; it has no recordkeeping, no search to speak of, no customization.... I could go on. We also have no direct access to the database; all we can get is a CD of what are essentially static pages of a particular issue.
It's also pretty close to being abandoned. No new licenses are sold and no new features are being added; the whole thing is in maintenance mode.
They jumped the subcription about 6 fold last year. I argued strenuously for something like RT, even worked out the cost of adding our needed features - 1/10 of the cost of the annual subscription of the proprietary product.
No dice. Not windows based, not supported by a major vendor, not approved by MS.
They're back to evaluating other, closed source, proprietary, locked in systems. So basically some people never learn.
I washed my hands of the whole deal when I was told "That's not how we do enterprise" as a response to my suggestion to use FOSS.
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What are you talking about? Companies love lock-in. They like knowing there is a phone number they can call and always get support. They like buying software from a company that's been around 30 years, so that when they are still using the same version of the same crappy program 15 years from now, they can be pretty sure help for their hilariously obsolete software is just a phone call or email away.
Granted, they eventually feel the pain of being on an ancient system that they have no way to migrate away fr
Count the minutes till the collapse (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
FLOSS weekly 137 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
Confluence is Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Confluence is Open Source (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the source is open to you, therefore it is open source. Nothing else matters.
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Actually, it is YOU who should go invent your own phrase, and YOU who is wrong. Open has a clearly defined meaning in English, and the OSI and FSF have no mandate to redefine the language. What you refer to is more adequately called Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) because it doesn't try to redefine the common vernacular.
I think you're looking at this backwards (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Idealism vs Pragmatism? (Score:2)
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I'd agree with that. You should make the recommendation based on which piece of software is better suited to the task. The consensus of other posters seems to be that that isn't Plone. More generally, given two identical feature sets from a commercial and an open-source application, the argument of which to use in a business setting still shouldn't fall to idealism. You'd have to look at support and frequency of updates. An open-source project with a large community may well be suitable but a smaller projec
Need more information (Score:2)
The requirements sound like you need knowledge management system. Not a content management system.
Of course that being said (without knowing the requirements), why wouldn't a wiki work? There are lots of wiki solutions available.
Feature Comparison (Score:2)
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.
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]
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Other FOSS Options (Score:2)
I know this isn't one of your stated options, but ModX 2.0 is worth a look. It's so well optimized for SEO that we cloned our site in it as a test, switched it on, and within a week its organic search ranking was just under the original that we pay $40K/mo. in paid search to promote.
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 shits
First, drop the bias (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to make a solid business case, you need to approach it objectively; what option will cost the least, in the short, medium and long term?
Maybe it's OSS, maybe it's not. But drop your bias right now before you research associated costs.
There is no sure-fire way (Score:2)
I have been all up and down that road. Cost isn't the only consideration. Accountability isn't the only consideration. Perception is often the most important consideration. Think of the difference between an H2 and a really nice pickup truck. If you think an H2 is a Humvee, you would be wrong! The construction of an H2 is a lot like a pickup truck. But the perception that the H2 is a civilian Humvee remains. So, people kept buying those stupid, over-priced pickup trucks thinking they were something
Errr.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I'd go with Confluence. It's not OSS, but it's and awesome Wiki. Choose what's the best tool for the job, not what suits your religion.
Wrong question (Score:2)
What argument could be made in favor of paying for a software package when one of equal or greater value can be had for free?"
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.
Plone CAN be very good (Score:2)
I've used Plone as a CMS in a company before and here's what I can tell you.
Plone security works great especially if you fine tune it. For example, you are definitely going to want to think about going in and tweaking what happens when documents move to different publishing states. I tweaked the "Publish External" to have the same privileges as internal publishing because for us, there was no such thing as external publishing since it was an internet facing company intranet and client extranet.
You will also
Don't push personal agendas on the company dime (Score:2)
Here's how you SHOULD be approaching it:
1) Gather requirements from your key stakeholders - the people who will use it daily, the people who will administer the systems, and the people who will write the checks to fund the effort. (users, admins, managers) - define the use cases the tool needs to support.
2) Survey the available solutions and generate a list of the top solutions that appear to satisfy your requirements - this is your list of tools to investigate.
3) If you have time, do a hands-on proof o
There's always trade offs (Score:2)
The choice is never straight-forward. From a business perspective, it is often easier to go with a commercial solution rather than a stand-alone FOSS product for the same reason people rather invest in a hedge-fund rather some random high-yield bet: risk. If something breaks, there's someone else responsible for fixing it in a timely manner. It's also the reason Red Hat is able to make a business off free software.
The main things you want to look at when considering your options include: feature set (is one
And the "support" from paid software can be bad... (Score:2)
Their response is "well there's no guarantee that the software will continue to be updated."
For what Robohelp costs, we could keep an IT person on full-time who could customize the software to our needs and make adjustments or add features in realtime.
The problem with bigger companies is the same problem as objects with a l
Keep your arguments simple and focused (Score:2)
If you think you can appeal to the guy on the basis of FOSS vs. proprietary software, then do it.
If you think there's a money angle (on initial cost, or on continued maintenance costs), then make it.
If there are things that Plone offers that Confluence does not, make a bullet list of those items.
If you're going to be the one maintaining this thing, spend a Saturday setting an install up in a VM so you can tell your boss all about how you already know how to use this tool. Human costs are often much greater
MediaWiki? (Score:3)
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:Cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
In some institutional cultures there is a surprising power(assuming you don't step on the wrong toes) in Just Fucking Doing It. Obviously, unless you have really impressive guts and not too much sense, this doesn't mean putting a production server on an internet facing IP and hacking the company's DNS records to point to it; but showing up with a solid, functioning demo that everyone can gather around the projector and poke around at on their laptops can really sell something.
If a proprietary product isn't either available as a free demo version, and not through some subscription program you have to sign up for, or so expensive that the company will send a guy in a nice suit to do the demo, hand out some swag, and give everyone a really nice handshake, doing that with a proprietary product is hard and/or illegal.
Doing it with a FOSS(or freeware, admittedly) product is easy. You just throw something together in a VM and show it off.
That was my experience when I was trying to convince my employer to drop sharepoint for a wiki. They weren't turned off by the cost of sharepoint; but the fact that I was able to ask my boss for some time at one of our department meetings, get behind the projector and say "Hey, I threw this demo together in a weekend and put in some example content so you can get an idea of how we would use it. Easy web interface, versioning, strong ability to create links between otherwise disparate pieces of technical knowledge, check it out at $INTERNAL_IP..." Everyone pulled out their laptops, poked around a bit, there was some discussion, and the boss green-lighted it.
Had I given a speech about how we had to, like, fight the proprietary power, man, it would have gone nowhere. However, being able to just sit down, turn on, and show off, all without any serious backing or funding(because everything was free) allowed me to go from "nothing" to "green light-full production status". "Free" never entered into it in a hard financial way. However, had it not been free, I couldn't have done what I did. Now, Anecdote doesn't equal data, much less proof; but it is something to consider.
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Mod parent up!
This strikes me as genuinely useful advice.
Two words: Vendor lockin (Score:4, Insightful)
Point out that the vendor can and will kill off a product and support for that product OR charge like a wounded bull for specialised support OR that the company may fold, and that they are not legally obligated to continue a product that the company may become dependent up. Then point out that in the case of open source, it is possible to hire someone to develop the product further and support it, and that even if there is a cost penalty it won't be extortionate.
All other arguments are a waste of time for mission critical applications. Open source may or may not be cheaper.
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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 fin
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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.
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Cost != price.
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That might be true, but in my experience the "support" you get from commercial CMS vendors is pretty much worthless. So if we assume that the FOSS support is equally worthless, at the very least FOSS gives you the advantage that you don't have to go through the vendor if there are bugs or other tweaks you want made.
Re:Cost? (Score:4, Funny)
Tits.
Seriously. Thats all you need to do. Hire a stripper and write Plone across her tits. Show it to your boss.
You don't understand business if you try logic and reason.