Unlike in North America and Europe, several factors are driving a greater interest in the Asia-Pacific region for open source content management-related technologies. First, poor support and usability of some commercial Web content management vendors' offerings are driving dissatisfaction among many business users.
Second, a backlash against major vendors' licensing policies and high total cost of ownership has forced many IT departments to address immediate content-related needs with little or no additional business funding. Third, but less dramatically, a backlash against Microsoft continues to pervade the region.
These issues will continue to drive Asia-Pacific organisations to seek less expensive and (hopefully) more effective content management solutions. However, the demand for open source alternatives will be tempered by a lack of long-term success.
Our research has shown that organisations adopting open source content management technologies will find an increase in overall development and support costs (up to ~30 percent) long term. This is due to users demanding better integration with legacy applications, business processes, and administration capabilities. The belief that content management is a distinct and isolated application, or that open interfaces/APIs will inherently provide business value, is flawed.
By 2005, only 5 percent of Asia-Pacific organisations will have adopted a comprehensive open source content management framework, with another 5 percent supporting a partial open source approach, based on the entrenchment of legacy applications deployed during 2003 to 2005 (please see Open source content management options below).
Is it showtime?
The successful utilisation of open source technologies has been restricted to commoditised platforms or services (e.g., Linux, Apache, JBoss). However, even these have yet to conclusively prove their cost benefits. As applications continue to be built on higher-level business services
(e.g., user management, identity profiling, preference management, document profiling, content categorisation), functional integration inherently becomes more complex. This reduces the value of open source solutions, because they typically focus only on improving the user interface or providing basic repository services.
Failing to address users' needs beyond basic content contribution or distribution will lead to a short-term user acceptance at best. Furthermore, the gap is filled with custom code that is typically undocumented, which effectively results in another custom application. Indeed, the belief that open content management can be successfully applied to the organisation is as much of an oxymoron as the acquiring of an open source-based solution for CRM.
However, several smaller IT organisations in the region have had some limited success by internally integrating numerous loosely related content management technologies (normally based on Apache Jakarta/Struts/Cocoon projects) but usually are limited in scope and functionality or are based on the expertise of a small group of enthusiastic developers.
The term "integration," used in the context of open source content management, is often assumed to mean integration with application server technologies, databases, and LDAP directories. Although this may be suitable during the early stages of open source deployment, the limitations of simple access to directories versus the use of more powerful content intelligence services (e.g., behavioural analytics, document clustering, user profiling) will see open source content management limited to simple Web publishing applications.
As users' expectations and their levels of experience with technologies increase, the ability for open source solutions to fully address quality-of-experience issues beyond content contribution is limited. For example, though many open source solutions offer more user-friendly Web-based interfaces, rich client-side content authoring environments based on XML editors (enabling functionally rich structured authoring) are rarely seen. Indeed, the current focus of open source content management is typically on Web-based creation of content or Web-based distribution processes.
Rarely do users of open source content management solutions take into account the convergence of interaction channels (e.g., multi-channel access) or address the broader functional needs of content management, such as managing quality, relevance, performance, structure, value, enhanced version control (e.g., personalisation and data synchronisation rollbacks--as opposed to simple site or page-based rollbacks), expiration, archiving, notification, etc.
Some solutions (e.g., Midgard) support only the MySQL database. This further fragments efforts to consolidate enterprise repositories and information sources. Adopters of open source content management solutions have typically applied the technology to solve pressing issues of usability and rapid content deployment for tactical needs, but have rarely taken advantage of the broader benefits of creating a multi-channel, enterprise-wide publishing, and content management architecture. We believe this short-term, tactical approach simply masks the much more pressing issue of developing better information management principles that focus on managing information in all forms and formats as corporate assets.
Furthermore, the focus only on the creation of content rather than the value of its consumption is forcing organisations to look for low-cost, but generally equally low-business-value, -analgesic" solutions. Removing users' immediate pains (due to the limitations imposed by larger commercial vendors, as previously mentioned) is seen as a better alternative, rather than risking users becoming disillusioned and, therefore, abandoning the technology.
Risky business
Our research shows that organisations employing open source content management solutions have become reactive to business demands rather than those proactively helping drive them. However, many have discovered that the effort required to gain the same level of benefit delivered by commercial vendors through the use of open source solutions--even lower-end offerings (e.g., GlobalSight, Macromedia) or hosted solutions (e.g., CrownPeak, Atomz, Refresh Software)--has become cost prohibitive over time.
Organisations adopting an appropriate content management framework can continue to provide a range of content-authoring tools that better suit end users' needs (i.e., a combination of online HTML forms and templates, simple content contribution tools such as Microsoft's FrontPage/Word, Macromedia's Dreamweaver, or the newly released Macromedia Contribute product being evaluated by several organisations). Thus, organisations can observe fewer negative impacts, as long as the authoring tools operate in the broader context of an enterprisewide content management framework.
The argument offered by technology-savvy users is that many commercial vendors have adopted third-party and open source solutions as part of their own stacks (e.g., bundling Linux, Apache HTTP server, JBOSS application server, or other developer tools). Although this is often true, it does not bring any greater credibility to the technology, because internal deployments do not necessarily reduce costs, risks, or liabilities for integration, compatibility, or reliability issues.
Open source content management solutions can be useful as short-term tactical approaches when fully featured commercial alternatives appear overweight or overvalued. However, we warn users that few organisations will be able to make a compelling business case for the deployment of a broader enterprise content management push once these technologies are in place (e.g., consolidating large numbers of existing sites).
Failure to address emerging business requirements for services such as categorisation, taxonomy management, user and document profiling, summarisation, syndication, alerting, subscription management, process-driven retrieval, etc. will lead to strategic business and IT alignment impotence.
Open source content management options
CSC has been actively promoting OpenCMS to its customers of outsourced solutions to more cost effectively address their immediate content
management needs. It reflects the level of dissatisfaction that exists in the user base with commercial offerings and the need for service
providers to find lower-cost solutions, even if this means functional limitations at a later stage.
Despite the apparent benefits of outsourcers -supporting" open source content management, there is no indication that their support will be
formal or long term. The same issues of integration will be encountered, leading to the client to ultimately pay for the additional work required.
Less commonly evaluated tools include:
Content management tools for intranets are perceived by many organisations as something that should be -free." Open source solutions initially
appear to be attractive alternatives. However, few organisations examine the benefits and impacts of applying better rigour and discipline to
managing internal information assets. Usability of the content--as opposed to usability of the tools used to create it--should be the primary
concern, which would lead organisations to recognise the full implications of costs versus benefit for well-designed content management
infrastructure.
Reflecting the true value of open source solutions, some offerings such as eZ Publish were originally offered as commercial solutions, but were
later submitted into the public domain because of their inability to satisfy commercial demands.
The most commonly evaluated open source tools in the Asia-Pacific region include:
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John Brand is vice president, Content & Collaboration Strategies at Meta Group.
META SAYS:
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You forgot one of the best ones. XOOPS!
http://www.xoops.org