Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

Kyle McNabb, in my opinion, is one of the best analysts in the ECM space. He recently co-authored a report “Identifying When To SharePoint, Or Not, For Business Content Needs”. This has some interest findings and quotes:

“A SharePoint initiative is like bamboo: the challenge isn’t getting it to flourish; it’s keeping it from taking over your IT garden”

“many I&KM professionals would say I’ve worked with ECMs, and I know ECMs. SharePoint, you’re no ECM”

Pandas may like bamboo but it not so good for managing content when the compliance and productivity of your company depend on it.

The limitations are discussed

• Lack of repository scalability
• Lack of structured workflow support
• Limited support for non MS-Office file types
• Limited lifecycle management

Some key lessons are discussed:

• Higher value content such as contracts or engineering assets are often stored in non-SharePoint systems
• Large files such as schematics can bring the system to its knees
• Often SharePoint is used as a work-in-progress repository and are then published into an authoritative library

This brings me to my point. Companies are having to:

• Manage more content not less
• Manage content for more users not less
• Offer greater compliance and productivity

ECM for the masses should offer a very low-cost set of simple content services for all users and all content that scales across the enterprise using standards so that all applications and all users are equal citizens. This is not SharePoint.

Forrester point out that the attraction of SharePoint is that “in conjunction with Office 2007 it offers a comfortable, if not intuitive, working environment for business users.” What is really required is a simple SharePoint front end such as MS-Office or another simple web-based consumer client accessing the enterprise content services. As Forrester point out Web parts to mimic the SharePoint user experience fall short. “to date, only Alfresco has implemented support for the SharePoint protocol to match SharePoint’s integration with Office desktop applications.”

Alfresco 3 addresses  these issues:

• Native SharePoint protocol support
• CMIS standards support through REST and Web Services bindings
• Share - a simple consumer web application for collaboration on content with a flex document previewer enabling office 2007 and non-Office 2007 users to share documents
• Email In support for document storage and discussions
• Support for all content types, Microsoft and non-Microsoft, large and small files, high-value and low-value content
• Scalability beyond the dozens of of SharePoint recommended restrictions - 100GB databases (often users restrict to 30GB for acceptable performance), 50 million documents per server
• A content services platform for Alfresco and non-Alfresco applications - MS-Office, Joomla!, Open Office, mediawiki

Alfresco can be downloaded at:

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_Labs

I would encourage you to read the Forrester report at:

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,47368,00.html

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There is a book “Curious Events in History”

and this week had a curious set of events.

December 1st - Business Week publishes an article “Cost-Concious Companies Turn to Open Source” - As the recession puts pressure on tech spending, many companies are turning to open-source software to handle more IT tasks. This featured users such as E*Trade, LA Times, Office Depot. Lee Thompson, Technology Chief  of E*Trade is quoted as follows:

“After the tech bubble burst, E*Trade’s technology chief, Lee Thompson, needed to find a way to do more with less. In 2001 and 2002, the online stock trading company shrank its tech budget by one-third. “We had to go through and figure out every penny that we were spending…and make alternatives to reduce those costs,” says Thompson, vice-president and chief technologist of E*Trade (ETFC). So he began using software that can be downloaded at no cost via the Internet. By the end of 2002, he was saving $13 million a year thanks to use of these freely available applications known as open-source software, and the fact that he could run that software on less expensive hardware .”

“For some companies, the benefits of open source extend well beyond cost savings, to such areas as license management. “Your engineers spend less time on contract negotiation and more time on the technology, which is really what you want them to be doing,” says E*Trade’s Thompson.”

“If you look at what’s happened in the last year and you look at what happened in the dot-com era, there are some parallels,” Thompson says. “A lot of people who are under a budget crunch like we were in 2001 will come to the same conclusion about open source.”

On December 1st The New York Times publishes an article “A Microsoft Veteran Embraces Open Source” In this article John Markoff writes about Keith Curtis, an 11 year Microsoft veteran who has just published a book “After the Software Wars”. Curtis says:

“The key to faster technological progress is making software free,” he writes. “The difference between free, and non-free or proprietary software, is similar to the divide between science and alchemy. Before science, there was alchemy, where people guarded their ideas because they wanted to corner the market on the mechanisms used to convert lead into gold. He notes that there is an important parallel to the end of the Dark Ages, which came when society began to freely share advancements in math and science.”

On December 3rd Alfresco publishes a white paper - “Total Cost of Ownership for Enterprise Content Management” that uses publicly available pricing information to show how it is possible to save, up to 89 percent of the cost of  Microsoft’s flagship SharePoint product and up to 96 percent of the cost of other ECM systems such as EMC/Documentum or OpenText in the first year.

December 3rd - Microsoft publishes out a press release - “Microsoft Gives Businesses Lower TCO Versus Hidden Costs of Open Source”

December 3rd - Mary-Jo Foley comment in ZDNet on the Microsoft release - “Microsoft disparages open-source TCO with year-old case study”. As Mary-Jo Foley points out:

“Microsoft Chief Software Ray Ozzie has made open-source interoperability one of his cornerstone platforms since he joined the company in 2005. At the same time, however, Microsoft’s Windows and Office teams are continuing to use total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) and customer case studies to prove that Linux and Open Office end up costing customers more than free/open-source software.”

“The Speedy Hire case study is not new. It dates back to December 2007. So why is Microsoft touting it today? Perhaps due to the recession and desire by companies to find ways to cut costs by using more free software?”

In times of recession, as Lee Thompson points out companies need to find a way to do more with less, figure out the value gained out of every penny they spend and make alternatives to reduce costs. Traditionally in the enterprise software space Microsoft has been seen as  the “value alternative”. There are parallels between what happened in the dot-com era and today. The difference today is that in the budget crunch more and more customers are seeing open source as the “value alternative” as opposed to Microsoft. As Keith Curtis said “Is this the end of the dark ages”.
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