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I figured most of you haven't seen Alfresco and don't have any idea about the company. Here are a few tidbits from a small company user of the free Alfresco, not the paid "enterprise" version. These are my impressions and don't reflect that of my employer.

We've used Alfresco for about 18 months. The initial "Labs" deployment had to be dropped from our testing due to HUGE bugs in the permissions code. The testing team didn't test it at all. We are still running the next non-Labs deployment without many issues at all. Even if we need to drop Alfresco and migrate to another solution, the content is still ours and we can get it all out. In the ECM space, it is important for you to own your content. Ask Microsoft about that and Sharepoint.

At an Alfresco conference last fall, it was presented that the average deployment was $200+K and Alfresco was paid about $25K for the "enterprise software and support" out of that total. The rest was earned by 3rd party partners. IME, they have always concentrated on the paying customers. An enterprise deployment in licenses begins around $25K by the time you get test, prod/failover licenses. It isn't for the small shops or a company running MS-SBS.

In a BOF meeting, I saw where a developer in a tiny company was begging for help, offering his code, and the Alfresco guys stood there silent. I asked for help with a migration to the current release, but since we'd deployed a dead code line, there is not upgrade process. I only wish the version we deployed were clearly marked as "dead line" at the time. Some kind of dev-2-dev interaction would have been encouraging even if they couldn't help at all after the conference. When we do migrate, we will lose our older versions of documents without manual steps. We will end up with all the current versions of documents with very little effort, however. The content is still ours, as it should be.

Alfresco has become an enterprise solution. I believe the Alfresco team has decided to compete against EMC/Documentum, FileNet and those huge $1M+ cost solutions instead of against MS-Sharepoint. Alfresco has certainly started with a schema that rivals Documentum and their support models AND capabilities do rival Documentum at a much smaller price.

The currently released version no longer supports Oracle as a DB in the FOSS release. The "enterprise" i.e. paid version does. This was removed in the 3.2 community release. It worked in 3.1. Why the removal? I guess they decided anyone who could afford Oracle could afford to pay Alfresco too, but I honestly don't know. Perhaps the Oracle JDBC library license changed? I dunno. Alfresco supports Active Directory and LDAP for authentication - like all corporate software should. Personally, I'd like to see OpenID supported too - since I'm not a Java programmer, I'm not in a position to contribute code. Anyone need some C/C++?

Alfresco is encouraging front-ends to link to it. Drupal and Joomla already have working connectors, but each deployment will need to be customized significantly. The default, provided, Alfresco web front end is a little clunky, but workable after you learn a few tricks. Moving a document is "cut" and "paste", not "move." I don't want to admit how long that took our users to figure out.

OTOH, Alfresco has been fine in our small deployment. It runs easily in a 512MB Xen VM - no swapping at all. That VM runs 3 other internal applications too. I suspect I could drop it down to 384MB and still have acceptable performance. The code seems fairly efficient and the architecture isn't bad at all. We use a few other pseudo-FOSS tools and have seen how bloated some of those can become (Zimbra).

At a minimum, Alfresco is a good replacement for Shared Folders out of the box. Your users don't need to know that it isn't a shared folder to use it. The CIFS implementation is fast. I saw where Adobe is providing Alfresco as a paid document service http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1276-Adobe-and-Al

Google doesn't need that many more smart technical people. What they could use some people who could figure out something other than ads that people would actually pay for. Their track record in actual products is awful. The overpriced "Google Search Appliance" isn't doing well.
They do corporate hosted mailboxes, but that's Postini, which they bought.

Google is really an ad agency. That's where the money comes from.

Google still needs smart people. They have competition, and often serious, heavy-weight competition, on every front. If they were to stagnate, as you suggest, they would die.

But why are you judging a service company by actual, by which you seem to mean physical, products, when they have class-defining services like Google Search, GMail, Google Scholar, Google Maps, etc., and not-quite-as-good-but-still-respectable services like Google Voice, Google Docs, Google Checkout, etc.? Saying that they're an also-ran in products is being nearsighted. And if by products you mean something that you must pay for to acquire, you've been missing the new business model. Google Chrome and Picassa being but two very-good-to-excellent products that are provided for free, and without advertising support.

So, while Google makes its money mostly from advertising, yes, saying that they have a bad track record on products doesn't seem quite clear headed.

Google doesn't need that many more smart technical people. What they could use some people who could figure out something other than ads that people would actually pay for. Their track record in actual products is awful. The overpriced "Google Search Appliance" isn't doing well. They do corporate hosted mailboxes, but that's Postini, which they bought.

Google is really an ad agency. That's where the money comes from.

drew,

I've been assuming that the FSF wouldn't support a licence that didn't allow redistribution. The Free Software Definition specifies the following freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0)
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

What I'm looking for is a licence that allows all freedoms except 2 (the freedom to redistribute). That's because freedom 2 is utterly incompatible with the production of commercial software, except where that software is consultingware, or tied to expensive hardware in some way.

As an aside: in his article Why Software Should Not Have Owners, Stallman completely misunderstands the point of the voluntary interaction between individuals that underpins a free society:

Whether you give a copy to your friend affects you and your friend much more than it affects me. I shouldn't have the power to tell you not to do these things. No one should.

In fact, if you want to use software, then the owner of the software may nominate the terms under which you use it. Obviously you are free to accept or decline, but once you've accepted, you must abide by the terms of the agreement.

Everyone should have the power to set the terms of an agreement - and the power to accept or decline that agreement.

Here's a question. I'm thinking of setting up a DAM using Dspace, and aside from the load Java will place on the server. How well do databases like MySQL or Postgresql handle BLOBS? Especially from a performance standpoint?

While this does seem to be the obvious answer, at least in name, this site is not what people expect. It is NOT dedicated to open source, and it does not have anything other than PHP apps, some of which are not CMSes.

If you know in advance you must be using PHP, and you're not sure whether you want a portal, CMS, weblog, etc, then this is a good site.

However, if you have other languages in mind, or are open to a good CMS in any language, you should check other sources. One good reference site is CMS Matrix. Another good source of CMS information is CMS Watch; even though it concentrates on the entire spectrum of CMS systems (including commercial ones) it occasionally has very good articles or pointers to articles about open source products (like this one which I just found).

And Google has since removed it from thier index: http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/508-Shame-on-Google

Interestingly, none of these "migration articles" on web sites that are explicitly devoted to CMS matters (e.g., CMSwatch.com, cmsReview.com) seem to characterize this problem as relating to Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL), raising the possibility that their authors are ignorant of the many ETL tools that are available. In the open source world, these tools include Octopus and Jetstream. Of course, Perl programmers do not call this process "ETL," but, rather, simply "data munging."

A prior Slashdot story on "Transferring data 'tween databases" (posted 14 April 2003) might interest you. I cannot post a link to it, however, because Slashdot's search engine is currently down.

Finally, EMC just bought Documentum, the CMS that you are considering. EMC is primarily a storage company, and I cannot help but wonder how CMS fits into their storage strategy.

Interestingly, none of these "migration articles" on web sites that are explicitly devoted to CMS matters (e.g., CMSwatch.com, cmsReview.com) seem to characterize this problem as relating to Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL), raising the possibility that their authors are ignorant of the many ETL tools that are available. In the open source world, these tools include Octopus and Jetstream. Of course, Perl programmers do not call this process "ETL," but, rather, simply "data munging."

A prior Slashdot story on "Transferring data 'tween databases" (posted 14 April 2003) might interest you. I cannot post a link to it, however, because Slashdot's search engine is currently down.

Finally, EMC just bought Documentum, the CMS that you are considering. EMC is primarily a storage company, and I cannot help but wonder how CMS fits into their storage strategy.

1. CMS Watch is probably the best single source. It's fairly new, apparently having begun in August, 2001. It lead me to the next two best Web sources on CMS's, which are the next two items in this list &nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.
2. CamWorld by Cameron Barrett, who has listed, in tabular format, several "leading" CMS's, including one or two open-source ones.
3. CMSwatch also lead me to Phil Suh's CMS site, which posts discussions among CMS users and those looking to implement a CMS. The only thing that I don't like about these discussions is that so many of the participants have never heard the terms "open source" or "free software." Too many of them think that they have to buy an expensive Vignette (for example) solution.
4. A recent poll at LinnuxLookup was informative. The January, 2002, poll indicated that PostNuke was far-and-away the most popular among those polled, as it bested both PHP Nuke and SlashCode. PostNuke won as to each of the eleven categories/questions, including "Best overall CMS." Zope was not among the choices available on the poll, however, and other good, open source alternatives were also missing, including most of the ones that are to be discussed at the open-source CMS developers' conference.
5. Drupal has a good discussion of CMS's, to wit, open-source versus commercial.
6. How to choose a CMS.
7. Of the commercial CMS's, Frontier is one of the most interesting and most promising. It's also reasonably priced, at least as compared to some of the other commercial CMS's.

weeell.. the first thing you need to understand is that some of these content management systems are really toolkits, some are more out-of-the box experiences... its kinda a spectrum.

my opinion - beware the hell of out of box stuff, (like red dot), you wanna budget about 50/50 buy vs build (or, better still save half your budget and use an open source system)

the open source alternatives, arsdigita, midgard, Zope Content Framework, are really every bit as good as the mid range CMS systems, but if the bureacracy is gonna wanna spend 400,000 dollars on a CMS systems like Vignette (bleech!) then nobody's gonna stop them.

<not a troll, no really>everybody, of course, is keeping a damn close eye on Microsoft, and their systyem is really shaping up, i gotta say, (if you like that sort of thing </not a troll>

if you want more, good info, check out cmswatch.com and *the*, definitive cms-list

True, but I've read this one, and it is general enough to cover just about every Content Management System.