Pelz-Sharpe Alan Pelz-Sharpe

Open Source ECM continues to grow

19-Aug-2007

South African open source ECM developer Knowledge Tree recently announced that their package has seen more than 380,000 downloads. Of course, veterans of open source projects will concede that downloads doth not a production implementation make. However, Knowledge Tree has sold the commercial version of the tool to such clients such as Bank of Scotland and the European Space Agency. Doubtless one of the appeals of the package is that it's written in PHP -- common enough among Web CMS tools, but quite rare for a document management platform.

It seems amazing that just a few years back there were no credible open source ECM vendors, and now we have at least three vibrant offerings, Nuxeo, Knowledge Tree and Alfresco, with more emerging. Throw into this the ECM-in-a-Box offering from InfoGrid, and the array of SaaS offerings hitting the market and one has to conclude that buyers' choices have never been wider. The ECM marketplace clearly remains far from mature.

    Excerpt from the Enterprise Edition Evaluation

    Document Management (ECM) Evaluation Stream looks at... Alfresco ECM Enterprise

    "Although the software itself is freely available for download, when you factor in the inevitable services work required for a complex application, along with the relatively steep maintenance and support fees that Alfresco itself charges, an Alfresco-driven project may be no less costly than a commercial competitor's offering...."
    (p. 715)

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Tags: Document Management (ECM), Marketplace at Large, Open Source, Selecting Technology, Enterprise Edition, Nuxeo Enterprise Platform