Open Source — Selling Software That Sells Itself

mrcgran writes to mention that LinuxWorld is running an interview with Alfresco's Matt Asay. "Open source is changing not just how companies make software, but how they sell it. Alfresco's Matt Asay explains the new sales cycle and the skills that today's software sales people need to close deals. [...] 'But you know what? We have worked with Microsoft on interop without doing any sort of a patent deal; as has Sugar and MySQL and Zend and these other companies. We work directly with Microsoft for a customer of ours to insure SQL Server integration with Alfresco. Didn't have to sign any patent deal with them to get that done. We both had a mutual customer. It was in our mutual interest. We both wanted to make money, therefore we did it. But the patent thing is a complete smoke and mirrors, I don't want to say trick, but it has nothing to do with interoperability. No matter how much Microsoft may repeat that, it has nothing to do with interoperability.'"

Comments

What Is Alfresco?

[dch24]

So if you're like me, wondering what is being slashvertised today, Alfresco is an open source content management system like SugarCRM.

A CMS (Content Management System) or CRM or Wiki allows a large number of users to collaborate online, typically meeting business needs like product delivery, scheduling, Human Resource management, and internal business documentation.

Does anyone know of other similar open source projects? In specific, I'm curious if there are other projects like SugarCRM. I know about all the different Wikipedia projects.

Re:What Is Alfresco?

[anticlimate]

Plone comes to mind as another open source CMS.

Re:What Is Alfresco?

[doubledjd]

>>Alfresco is an open source content management system like SugarCRM. I haven't used alfresco but would argue that there is a sizeable difference between cms and crm.

>>Does anyone know of other similar open source projects? http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ is a decent place to start

Re:What Is Alfresco?

[gravyface]

A CMS (Content Management System) or CRM or Wiki allows a large number of users to collaborate online, typically meeting business needs like product delivery, scheduling, Human Resource management, and internal business documentation.

Not quite.
    You might get away with lumping a CMS with a wiki (depending on the features of the software), but a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system would typically manage your sales/customer lifecycle where a (Web) CMS would manage your Web site and the people who interact with it.

Re:What Is Alfresco?

[thule]

SugarCRM is nothing like Alfresco! Alfresco is more like products like Documentum. Alfresco is the solution for all those documents you have laying around your company's share drives. Drag those documents into Alfresco. It's simple, just connect to Alfresco using FTP/WEBDAV/CIFS (SMB). Alfresco will authenticate against almost anything. Alfresco indexes all the documents. Change a document? Alfresco keeps the revisions. Want to start a discussion about the document? No prob. Need to find a document? All documents in Alfresco are searchable. Open a document in Word and see the revisions and TODO's? No problem, there is a MS Office and OpenOffice plugin.

Alfresco gets compared to Sharepoint a lot, but from what I've seen it is much better than SP.

The thing that I'm looking forward to is wiki integration. Now that will be amazing. Full web content managed along side traditional .doc files.

Forget putting .doc's in Samba. Use Alfresco! I wish the word would get out on this thing. It is fantastic software that is badly needed.

I do not represent the Alfresco company in any way. I'm just a person that recently discovered it.

Re:Is Alfresco open source?

[rolfc]

The community version does not need a license key, but you used the Enterprise trial version. on the download page you can read "Please note this is a time-limited trial and by installing the software you are agreeing to our Enterprise Trial license, specifically that you will uninstall it in 30 days if you decide to not purchase the Alfresco Enterprise Network" If you want open-source, use the community version.

Re:Is Alfresco open source?

[morgan_greywolf]

Yes. What's on the Alfresco website is indeed demoware. You can get the open source edition from their dev site here.

The one page version

[khasim]

http://www.linuxworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x_linux.c gi?pagetosend=/export/home/httpd/linuxworld/news/2 007/081607-matt-asay-interview.html&pagename=/news /2007/081607-matt-asay-interview.html&pageurl=http ://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/081607-matt-asay-i nterview.html&site=lw_general

Brand the sucker

[rinkjustice]

Open source developers need to brand their software more. Give it a personality and a cool logo, sell some mugs and t-shirts to generate some revenue, maybe sell an instruction guide (um, or maybe not). Throw up some YouTube videos that showcases the features (or better yet, the benefits for the user). I know it's not about the money with open source, but making a little cheddar on the side isn't gonna hurt.

Yours truly,
An open source fan

Re:Brand the sucker

[HappyUserPerson]

I know it's not about the money with open source, but making a little cheddar on the side isn't gonna hurt.

What's wrong with making money writing software directly? Why should programmers be damned to pursue a menial job while voluntarily writing software in their free time? Is programming for a living not a worthy occupation?

Print Version

[thePsychologist]

Print version of the article on a single page.

There are about six or seven of these multipage articles linked to on Slashdot each day. It took me less than twelve seconds to get the link to this one. Would it not be possible for submitters/editors to do this? Or is it that Slashdot has some kind of agreement not to do this?

Fascinating article

[theolein]

That article is worth its weight in raw platinum. The guy from Alfresco sound like one of the most open, decent and honest management types I've ever heard give an interview. The interview raised so many points that get discussed over and over and over here on slashdot, such as the need for sales people to be mediated by engineers so as not to give false expectations, such as the feeling that the propietry software models are not working very well because they are simply too expensive and place too much risk on the customer. He also notes how SuSE went south after the Microsoft-Novell deal, this directly from data on his own product.

The guy sounds like he would be a real pleasure to work for.

Comment is horrible

[schmu_20mol]

Care to use the normal font next time?

Technologies and not devmodels moving into battle

[Qbertino]

More and more I see OSS winning over in key markets. In fact I see the major conflict not in 'which Vendor do you use?' but in 'which technology do you use?'. Which is actually the way it should be. For instance: I've got a medium size web project comming up - a web-based B2B/CRM plattform - and the big figtht wasn't "proprietary" vs. "OSS" but "Symfony" vs. "CakePHP". The customer has some buddy companies who all use Cake, so I'm suposed to build the thing in CakePHP aswell.

What I find interesting is that throughout the entire evaluation and preperation phase the entire 'OSS or not' question wasn't even being discussed and allready had been decided in favour of OSS. Shrinkwrap software business is mostly a thing of the past. It's about how and with what extras and service you can deliver you software.