Blog posts about Open Source

Mind the Drupal Talent Shortage

Added By Tony Byrne on 16-May-2012

I had lunch the other day with a couple of acquaintances who work at a systems integrator (SI) that does a lot of work for the federal government (a.k.a., "beltway bandit").

They pointed out that, like SharePoint of yore, Drupal was all the rage among US federal web managers under this current administration. So naturally this SI went looking for experienced Drupal talent. And could not find any ... Continue Reading

Google, Dropbox, Box, SharePoint, and others battle in the cloud

Added By Apoorv Durga on 27-Apr-2012

Google finally released its much rumored Google Drive, a new competitor in the increasingly crowded cloud-based file sharing and sync marketplace. As with all things Google, the Drive announcement generated a huge amount of hype across the blogosphere and twitterverse.

Many commentators compare Drive with Dropbox and to some extent Microsoft's SkyDrive and Apple's iCloud. However, there are many, many more choices ... Continue Reading

Multiple Portals or One Single Portal?

Added By Apoorv Durga on 13-Apr-2012

In the good old days, when your firm's Enterprise Portal was a "gateway to the world," the thinking was that you needed to standardize on one single Portal platform, and perhaps even on single enterprise portal instance.

However, as we all know, that's not really very practical (both for technical and organizational reasons), and multiple portal platforms have always proliferated within organizations ... Continue Reading

Portals Research version 9.1 has updates to IBM WebSphere and Liferay Evaluations

Added By Apoorv Durga on 6-Apr-2012

We've just updated our Enterprise Portals research with updates to our reviews of IBM WebSphere and Liferay.

Within the Portals marketplace, IBM and Liferay seem to be the ones that most frequently appear on customer short lists ... Continue Reading

Rave Becomes a New Apache Portal Project

Added By Apoorv Durga on 5-Apr-2012

About a year back, when Apache Rave was announced, I had mentioned in my blog that It will be a while before Rave reaches a stage where customers can actually benefit from it. Now Rave has graduated to become an Apache top-level project. That itself is an achievement and congratulations are in order to the team supporting Rave. But is Rave anywhere closer to realizing its promise, and is it good enough today for you to consider it seriously for your Portal? ... Continue Reading

Razuna: Open source DAM for simple brand management

Added By Irina Guseva on 2-Apr-2012

In the recently released version 4.2 of our Digital & Media Asset Management Report, you will see several new products that we’ve added to our research. One of them is Razuna -- not only a new entrant to our report, but a novice to the DAM market in general ... Continue Reading

eXo Platform quietly goes for Cloud and Mobile

Added By Apoorv Durga on 8-Feb-2012

The open source eXo portal platform released their latest version 3.5 last week. eXo platform is a "portal-like" offering that we cover in our Portals and Content Integration report. It's based on the GateIn open source portal container that eXo co-developed with Red Hat JBoss. ... Continue Reading

Alfresco Version 4 is Buzzword Compliant

Added By Apoorv Durga on 7-Feb-2012

Last week open source document management vendor Alfresco released Version 4 of its (commercially-supported) enterprise edition package. As we've come to expect from Alfresco, it's long on buzzwords and interesting new directions, but a bit short on functional niceties and architectural continuity ... Continue Reading

Joomla continues enterprise journey -- sort of

Added By Apoorv Durga on 30-Jan-2012

This week, the Joomla! community released version 2.5 of its open source CMS package. There are many new features but the key highlights of the new release are ... Continue Reading

2012 Technology Predictions

Added By Jarrod Gingras on 6-Dec-2011

It's that time of year for our team of Real Story Group analysts to reveal our 2012 predictions, where we try to predict what the future holds in the technology world ... Continue Reading

Latest update to our Web CMS vendor evaluations

Added By Tony Byrne on 22-Nov-2011

We've just released a minor update to our Web CMS Report, which evaluates 42 major products from around the globe. Version 20.3 includes updated reviews of ... Continue Reading

A big repository change for Nuxeo

Added By Sanjeev Gupta on 18-Aug-2011

I was recently updating the Nuxeo evaluation in our Document & Records Management Research, and the biggest news here is that the open source ECM vendor has replaced its repository layer ... Continue Reading

Implications of Joomla! 1.7 and the Joomla! Platform

Added By Sanjeev Gupta on 19-Jul-2011

The Joomla! open source WCM community today released version 1.7, just 6 months after the release of 1.6. Perhaps because the development team has been busy stabilizing a 1.6 trunk that was packed with many new features, version 1.7 does not offer much of significance for end users ... Continue Reading

How much does WCM cost?

Added By Irina Guseva on 19-Apr-2011

I am asked this question a lot in relation to different vendors. I know the answer. But I am always perplexed by the origin of the question. ... Continue Reading

Using Google for Lucene

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 11-Apr-2011

As I've noted on this blog many times before, a lot of Google Search Appliance's "features" are actually outside-of-the-box, rather than out-of-the-box. That can present an unpleasant surprise to many Google customers. But ironically, it's also a great advantage to anyone who wants to use ... Continue Reading

Should You Employ the Same Web CMS Tool for Public Sites and Intranets?

Added By Tony Byrne on 5-Apr-2011

In the early days of Web Content Management, many customers tried to employ the same technology -- and often the same physical infrastructure -- for publishing both their intranet and public websites. During most of the past decade, the trend has been to separate these efforts ... Continue Reading

What DotNetNuke moving CMS core to C# means for customers

Added By Irina Guseva on 3-Mar-2011

More than eight years after its inception in pure VB.NET, open source project DotNetNuke decided to make a leap and move its entire CMS core to the more modern and widely supported C# ... Continue Reading

A more skeptical look at new repository and portal initiatives

Added By Apoorv Durga on 2-Mar-2011

This seems to be a season of "proposals" by open source vendors to attach pieces of their code to a larger foundation. It sounds promising, but the benefits for you the customer could remain far off ... Continue Reading

Web CMS comparison update

Added By Tony Byrne on 24-Feb-2011

This month's update to our Web CMS Report evaluations offers the latest critiques of nine web content management vendors: ... Continue Reading

Antenna Software Acquires Volantis Systems

Added By Apoorv Durga on 9-Feb-2011

Unlike most acquisitions in the Content Technology Marketplaces that we cover, this one actually seems like one in which there is not much overlap between two vendors' offerings. Antenna Software, a provider of mobile applications mainly for enterprises, acquired Volantis Systems, a company focused on delivering content to mobile browsers, concentrated more on the consumer Internet ... Continue Reading

Android Tablet or iPad

Added By Apoorv Durga on 8-Feb-2011

Google demonstrated Android 3.0 -- a.k.a., Honeycomb -- last week. Honeycomb is a version of their mobile operating system optimized for tablets. It works within a bigger form factor, and also packs in much more power to be able to run videos, games, and other applications better. But that's not the point of this post ... Continue Reading

Microsoft supports SharePoint WCM alternative with Orchard

Added By Apoorv Durga on 17-Jan-2011

An omnibus platform like SharePoint presents two challenges to Microsoft in the web publishing arena:

It doesn't employ the very latest version of .NET
Long update cycles means it can fall behind functionally

Neither challenge is prohibitive, but both are potentially problematic ... Continue Reading

Selecting Software in the Federal Government

Added By Tony Byrne on 13-Jan-2011

I recently had the chance to sit down with the famous John Gilroy of Federal Tech Talk on Federal News Radio in Washington, DC. The 30-minute show aired earlier this week, but you can listen to or download the archive ... Continue Reading

Drupal 7 - One Small Step for Mankind

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 5-Jan-2011

After a long wait, extended several times, Drupal 7 was released today. So what is it like, and should you rush over to download and install it right away? ... Continue Reading

Which is better, Drupal or WordPress?

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 13-Dec-2010

One question I get on a regular basis is, "so, what's the best CMS?" And I invariably reply, "it depends." There really is no best CMS; there is only the best fit for you, in your scenarios ... Continue Reading

Lots of information - not enough critiques

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 8-Dec-2010

We always follow the communities around specific products quite closely. Whether an open source or commercial closed source system, product communities can give us great input on the real story. But one thing to remember is that the most active and enthusiastic communities are also a really biased source of information ... Continue Reading

Our ECM Maturity Model meets MIKE2.0

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 18-Nov-2010

ECM3 is without a doubt the most successful maturity model for ECM, with downloads of the model passing the 5,000 mark recently ... Continue Reading

First Take on Alfresco 3.4 WCM

Added By Apoorv Durga on 14-Oct-2010

Alfresco recently released a new community version 3.4 of its Content Management System. The enterprise version of this will be released later this year. The latest version has some new features as well as enhancements such as a sample application called Web Quick Start, DocLib portlets, Distributed Repository Replication, Enhancements to Alfresco Web Editor (AWE) and Share. ... Continue Reading

JBoss and eXo Portal Platforms: Similar, Yet Different

Added By Apoorv Durga on 24-Sep-2010

Competitors and Partners, eXo and JBoss have both announced their new Portal offerings based on their collaborative project GateIn. While JBoss had released Enterprise Portal Platform (EPP 5) a while back, eXo released eXo Platform 3.0 this week ... Continue Reading

IBM Search, powered by Lucene, is a forklift upgrade

Added By Apoorv Durga on 21-Sep-2010

Rather quietly, IBM has replaced the search index within their OmniFind Enterprise Edition. The latest release of this search engine, version 9.1 supports new search collections that are based on Lucene ... Continue Reading

Skeptical about DotNetNuke getting enterprisey

Added By Tony Byrne on 20-Aug-2010

Many observers expected big things when DotNetNuke Corporation raised serious venture capital in November, 2008. (DotNetNuke Corporation is the commercial entity behind the sprawling, open source CMS community by the same name) ... Continue Reading

Do you need a simple or a complex CMS?

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 7-Jul-2010

I sometimes warn that a vendor's content management system is well suited to "simple" scenarios, but not necessarily a good fit for "more complex" cases. That's a bit problematic: ... Continue Reading

WordPress 3.0 released: Bzzzzz.

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 2-Jul-2010

Well, it was to be expected: after a long wait, WordPress 3.0 got released just when I was on a short holiday. (WordPress admins shouldn't be allowed to take holidays for that exact reason.) ... Continue Reading

Red Hat Releases JBoss EPP 5

Added By Apoorv Durga on 28-Jun-2010

Although released a couple of weeks back, Red Hat made a formal announcement of the release of their new JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform (EPP 5) on Thursday at the Red Hat summit in Boston. As we have mentioned before, this release is a completely re-architected platform built on GateIn, the portal they jointly developed with eXo. ... Continue Reading

ECM3 Maturity Model - Version 2.0

Added By Jarrod Gingras on 28-Jun-2010

The community commons ECM Maturity Model (www.ECM3.org) progressed to v2.0 last week ... Continue Reading

Drupal Gardens: A Critical Review of the First Bloom

Added By Tony Byrne on 20-May-2010

My colleague Adriaan Bloem has produced a short briefing answering two important questions that have emerged around Drupal Gardens ... Continue Reading

Joomla! Upgrade - Pros and Cons

Added By Apoorv Durga on 19-May-2010

More than two years after it's last major version was released, the Web CMS project Joomla! has announced the beta version of its next major release (1.6). For an open source project, that's a lot of time between two versions. ... Continue Reading

Jive and Drupal: Don't take their word for it

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 16-Apr-2010

This is just a little tiff between vendors, so why should you care? Well, both are making it abundantly clear that a vendor is not a neutral source of information ... Continue Reading

Little Lucid gets big funding for Lucene

Added By Kas Thomas on 11-Mar-2010

Lucid Imagination, the commercial company that distributes its own certified versions of the open source Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technology, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from a series of venture capital firms ... Continue Reading

Which CMS does The Real Story Group Use?

Added By Tony Byrne on 3-Mar-2010

I get that question a lot, especially since one of our main services is called "CMS Watch" ... Continue Reading

Beware Drupal, Joomla! plug-in vulnerabilities

Added By Kas Thomas on 1-Mar-2010

IBM has released its IBM Security Solutions X-Force 2009 Trend and Risk Report, and the news for users of popular WCM platforms Drupal, Joomla!, TYPO3, and WordPress is decidedly mixed ... Continue Reading

Open Source is not always cheaper

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 23-Feb-2010

On the document-management shortlist of a mid sized publishing firm this month lay four bidders: a specialist incumbent, two household name vendors (IBM & Microsoft), and an open source option ... Continue Reading

New Enterprise Portals Research

Added By Jarrod Gingras on 28-Jan-2010

Yesterday we launched our most recent Enterprise Portals Research. This report critically evaluates 13 portal vendors and products, which we break up into 2 categories: ... Continue Reading

A Tale of Two Portals - Part 2

Added By Apoorv Durga on 8-Jan-2010

GateIn -- the collaborative Portal project from Red Hat JBoss and eXo -- has been making decent progress. A beta 4 was released recently the current timeline proposes final release in March, 2010 ... Continue Reading

The boondoggle that is software maintenance fees

Added By Tony Byrne on 28-Jul-2009

Annual software support and maintenance fees are something every customer loves to hate, and yet, for the most part we keep paying them ... Continue Reading

Interest in Lucene continues to accelerate

Added By Kas Thomas on 14-Jul-2009

A while back, I wrote about our decision to expand our coverage of Apache Lucene for the Search and Information Access Report, based on what seemed like an accelerating rate of adoption of Lucene and related technologies ... Continue Reading

Bluenog angers Hippo

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 13-Jul-2009

Bluenog, an upstart web content management company, continues to make waves. But not always the kind of waves they'd like ... Continue Reading

Open source: it's just a license

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 13-Jul-2009

A lot of my time is spent evaluating technology, and I have a confession to make: the licensing is one of the least spectacular bits to review. ... Continue Reading

Lucene can read almost anything: Lucid and ISYS team up

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 30-Jun-2009

A few months ago, I blogged about ISYS offering their document converter filters as a separate component. My thought was these would come in handy to add on ... Continue Reading

When will ECM open up?

Added By Jarrod Gingras on 20-May-2009

We're often asked why there are so few ECM open source options, when at the same time the Web CMS marketplace supports so many open source alternatives? ... Continue Reading

CMIS gets new momentum, thanks to Chemistry

Added By Kas Thomas on 27-Apr-2009

There's been an interesting development with regard to Content Management Interoperability Services ... Continue Reading

Searching Lucene, Solr, and the gang

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 26-Mar-2009

A rather quaint trait of the Apache Lucene project's homepage is that the search is actually powered by Google ... Continue Reading

Lucene and the return of bundled CMS and Search

Added By Tony Byrne on 25-Mar-2009

Today we released some findings pointing out how Web CMS vendors are increasingly embedding website search into their packages ... Continue Reading

Dutch government consolidating websites on Hippo CMS 7

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 10-Mar-2009

The Dutch government has announced the new website www.rijksoverheid.nl, and has chosen Hippo CMS 7 ... Continue Reading

Pardon the ECM Interruption

Added By Jarrod Gingras on 5-Mar-2009

The AIIM International Expo and Conference in Philadelphia, PA is rapidly approaching. One session that I am particularly excited about is ... Continue Reading

Contrasting multi-site management in Drupal and Joomla

Added By Tony Byrne on 18-Feb-2009

Last night I had the pleasure of presenting to a DC-area Drupal Users' Group on the past and future of open source web content management ... Continue Reading

Startup offers commercial support for Lucene

Added By Kas Thomas on 26-Jan-2009

For the most recent edition of the Search and Information Access Report, I had the opportunity to help expand our coverage of Apache Lucene. ... Continue Reading

Alfresco unveils a major upgrade

Added By Kas Thomas on 21-Jan-2009

Today is a big day for Alfresco (and Alfresco users). This is the official launch date for Alfresco Labs 3d (Stable), ... Continue Reading

Pondering the future of .NET 2.0 solutions like DNN and Telligent

Added By Tony Byrne on 2-Jan-2009

Recently I've been thinking about two packages we cover -- DotNetNuke (DNN) in The Web CMS Report, and Telligent Community Server in the Enterprise Social Software Report -- in the wake of the rise of SharePoint. ... Continue Reading

Vibrancy in the ECM market

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 16-Dec-2008

The ECM world is dominated by EMC, Open Text, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle -- all big vendors with equally big publicity machines to keep their brands and "story" right ... Continue Reading

Open Source blogging, the Oxite way

Added By Kas Thomas on 9-Dec-2008

If you're one of the many industry observers who's wondered why Microsoft hasn't created a decent blogging platform ... Continue Reading

Apache Lucene site -- powered by Google

Added By Kas Thomas on 30-Oct-2008

What's wrong with this picture? ... Continue Reading

CMS Watch launches online ECM Technology Education

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 3-Sep-2008

Today we are really excited to launch our latest online course, Fundamentals of ECM Technology ... Continue Reading

How fast will Chrome tarnish?

Added By Kas Thomas on 2-Sep-2008

It's too soon to know what to make of Google's new Chrome browser (I've only been hammering on it a short time), but I have to admit I was disappointed ... Continue Reading

Quick: what do Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress have in common?

Added By Kas Thomas on 18-Aug-2008

Big Blue recently released its IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force 2008 Mid-Year Trend Statistics report ... Continue Reading

Alfresco as a SharePoint alternative

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 31-Jul-2008

Microsoft SharePoint goes open source? Shock, horror! Ok, well not quite, but an open source alternative to SharePoint is now an option with the release of Alfresco's Lab 3 beta product ... Continue Reading

Stop the Presses: the Word is out

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 30-Jul-2008

WordPress version 2.6 was released two weeks ago, and as I reviewed 2.5 for the Enterprise Social Software Report 2008, I was eager to run it through its paces ... Continue Reading

Is uPortal a good fit for self-service?

Added By Janus Boye on 30-Jul-2008

In an interesting blog posting by Andrew Petro, Senior Software Engineer at Unicon, he mentions that uPortal is commonly successfully adopted as a self-service portal platform. By contrast, our research finds uPortal is an unlikely fit for e-business and self-service portals ... Continue Reading

Adobe's brave new stack

Added By Kas Thomas on 8-Jul-2008

Over at the Adobe Developer Connection website, Belgian developer Sébastien Arbogast has posted an interesting article (a tutorial of sorts) on how to write next-generation web apps in Flex ... Continue Reading

Open source and Digital Asset Management

Added By Tony Byrne on 22-May-2008

Joseph Bachana recently posted in these pages an excellent article on the Digital Asset Management (DAM) marketplace. I disagreed somewhat, though, ... Continue Reading

Enterprise search: free as in free beer?

Added By Adriaan Bloem on 16-May-2008

Searching information -- really, how hard can it be? So, why wouldn't you go out and get a search engine that's for free ... Continue Reading

A caution about Drupal as a social software platform

Added By Apoorv Durga on 13-May-2008

The open source package Drupal is one of the few social publishing platforms built on top of a longstanding Web CM (WCM) system ... Continue Reading

Reinventing the Java application server

Added By Kas Thomas on 6-May-2008

Just when you thought the Java application server market was pretty well saturated ... Continue Reading

uPortal 3: The long wait is over for a major release

Added By Janus Boye on 30-Apr-2008

When JA-SIG announced Version 3.0 of uPortal in mid-April, it marked the ending of a very long development cycle ... Continue Reading

Special challenges of managing school websites

Added By Tony Byrne on 7-Apr-2008

Today I spent a delightful morning with 75 web managers from "K-12" (i.e., primary and secondary) school districts around the U.S. ... Continue Reading

Clickability as Open Source?

Added By Jarrod Gingras on 31-Mar-2008

I received an e-mail this weekend from a very confused researcher of Web Content Management systems. The first result they found in their search results was this paid advertisement from Clickability... ... Continue Reading

The Web CMS Scene in Europe

Added By Tony Byrne on 11-Mar-2008

The fragmentation of the global Web Content Management technology space continues unabated, although we see significant regional differences. In Europe ... Continue Reading

Open source should mean open discussions about open roadmaps

Added By Janus Boye on 11-Feb-2008

Last week I wrote a commentary on whether the future of Plone lies in web publishing. This was based on a candid blog posting by Plone co-founder Alexander Limi, where he said that the community should "realize that web publishing isn't our main area." ... Continue Reading

Joomla!, open source, and security

Added By Tony Byrne on 3-Jan-2008

Some people prefer the open source, PHP-based Joomla! Web CMS because it is relatively simple to install and run. But just as complexity can bring unexpected problems, so too can simplicity ... Continue Reading

VC funding for Drupal?

Added By Tony Byrne on 30-Nov-2007

I've heard from several different sources about a "hot deal" for venture capital funding of a Drupal-oriented start-up called Acquia ... Continue Reading

Plone: What's in a name...

Added By Janus Boye on 26-Oct-2007

Earlier this month at the annual Plone Conference 2007, the consulting firm "Plone Solutions" announced it would change its name to ... Continue Reading

De-mystifying the Gartner ECM Magic Quadrant

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 28-Sep-2007

Late last year we blogged on the 2006 Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) for ECM - and made the point that inclusion in the chart is believed by vendors to have a very positive impact on their sales. In the 2007 MQ - published this past week - it's clear that little (in Gartner's view) has changed in the ECM world. Well, we beg to differ ... Continue Reading

Open Source ECM continues to grow

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 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 ... Continue Reading

Scalability the Terracotta Way

Added By Kas Thomas on 14-Aug-2007

One of the theoretical advantages of Java-based Portals and Content Management applications is the ability to cluster servers for better performance. But the reality is that clustering is a black art that few vendors and implementation teams really ever seem to master adequately. So it comes as a (welcome) surprise to learn of an open-source technology that delivers many (if not most) of the things customers want here, but in surprisingly quick, painless fashion, at low cost, with no need to recompile code or stay up nights learning about disturbing-sounding concepts like "STONITH" (shoot the other node in the head). ... Continue Reading

Magnolia's new enterprise edition is more of a departmental tool

Added By Janus Boye on 14-Jul-2007

We've now started coverage of Magnolia as a part of the Web CMS Report. Like many open source Web content management tools, Magnolia has seen growing exposure in recent years. ... Continue Reading

True ECM for Salesforce.com?

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe on 20-Jun-2007

The story begins with Computer Associates (CA), who spun off its Ingres line into a separate, open source project. Ingres is now teaming up with open source ECM provider Alfresco. The Ingres "Icebreaker" product (linux + database stack) will offer an ECM option provided via Alfresco. ... Continue Reading

Joomla! CMS faces a governance challenge

Added By Tony Byrne on 20-Jun-2007

A nicely-researched article on Linux.com investigates a growing dust-up in the Joomla! community regarding licensing and business models. Joomla! is an open source CMS package that forked from Mambo a couple of years ago. After encouraging 3rd-party development of commercial add-on modules, Joomla's leadership is reconsidering its approach in light of the core package's somewhat purer GPL license, ... Continue Reading

Joomla! and Mambo are finally different

Added By Apoorv Durga on 14-May-2007

As Web CMS Report readers know, Joomla!'s roadmap for future versions is quite ambitious. The project has indeed incorporated many new features in the recently released Joomla! 1.5 Beta-2, called "The Red Barchetta." ... Continue Reading

The case against TypoScript

Added By Tony Byrne on 10-May-2007

Typo3 is a longstanding and very popular open source Web CMS. Although written in PHP, Typo3 employs own declarative configuration language called "TypoScript" for templating. TypoScipt's language and syntax are sufficiently complicated to merit an entire book on it. ... Continue Reading

Drupal isn't Web-2.0-in-a-box

Added By Tony Byrne on 3-Apr-2007