Convincing Your Employer To Go With FOSS?

mark72005 writes "My employer is currently looking at adopting a content management system for use by our technical support staff (primarily first-line end user support, but hopefully it will include deeper levels of support personnel eventually). The candidates are currently Plone (OSS) and Confluence (proprietary, closed-source). For those with experience in each, what arguments in favor of Plone could be made to managers more interested in pragmatism than idealism?"

Comments

Confluence did not impress me

[grahamwest]

I've used TWiki (OSS, all Perl IIRC and aimed at corporate usage) at one job and Confluence at another but not Plone. Confluence is good for non-technical people because it has a pretty good wysiwig editor, but its search was simply wretched. I think we had a lot of 'lost' knowledge in the Confluence DB because nobody knew it was there and the obvious searches didn't show it - I would come across nuggets now and then. If you have the discipline to build index pages, it's probably a good choice if you have a lot of non-engineer type people.

TWiki (and this was a number of years ago so it may have improved) was almost the reverse. Good search, good architecture for plugins, but no wysiwyg so non-technical contributors had trouble with it. They were writing a wysiwyg plugin so that may have now arrived. It was easy to maintain and of the two I would say I like it better.

Re:Confluence did not impress me

[Anonymous Coward]

My group evaluated about a half dozen wiki products. We ultimately went with Confluence for a few reasons:

• Fine grained ACL rather than locked/unlocked
• Good editor that doesn't rely on IE (one requirement was that it works in Linux, which is why we didn't go with the corporate sharepoint)
• Supports LDAP including groups
• You can edit in Word (or Excel?) on the wiki if you have a plugin
• Product suite integration with Jira

Yes the search sucks. You can use tagging to sort out things to some extent but good organization is key.
One "benefit" is that it can import from several other wiki solutions including Mediawiki which was our old solution. While the importer works, formatting is trashed so you pretty much have to have someone go and clean up after it.

Liferay

[Tepar]

Might I suggest Liferay (http://www.liferay.com)? Open source, but also commercial, and more featureful than both Plone and Confluence.

FLOSS weekly 137

[keith_nt4]

I haven't used either system but the podcast FLOSS weekly recently did a whole episode about PLONE that may help you decide if it is right you.

Re:Count the minutes till the collapse

[seebs]

That would be a totally coherent or relevant comment in an alternate universe where the question had to do with a replacement for MS Word. Please tell us how you get to that universe, so we can loot their alternate technology to improve our own.

In short, "let's say an open office variant" is a pure non-sequitur, because "competition for MS Word" is a field where compatibility is widely imagined to be important. (Note: I've had a lot of trouble with compatibility between MS Word and MS Word -- in fact, more than I've had between MS Word and OpenOffice.) We're talking about a tool for internal use, at which point, all that matters is its compatibility with itself -- it's not something that other people send you stuff for. And, even if it were, the chances that the commercial one is an effective monopoly aren't high.

MS Word is really a very special case, and no example based on it is likely to be relevant to other cases.

FWIW, we use Foswiki at work these days, I think, and we're pretty happy with it. Search is sorta frustrating, though -- it really does need someone keeping it maintained.

Confluence is Open Source

[MeanMF]

Atlassian makes the source for all of their products available to anybody who buys a license. It doesn't cost anything extra, and even the $10 starter licenses come with full source.

do you want a CMS, or a wiki?

[WhiteDragon]

Plone is a CMS, Confluence is a wiki. Incedentally, both products are quite good. I used Confluence at a previous job and it is a very nice wiki. We used it because of it's tight integration with Jira, an issue tracking system by the same software vendor.

Re:Confluence

[Zero1za]

Also, strictly speaking, Confluence IS open source, it's just not FOSS. You get access to the source code with your license, and as long as you keep your license up to date, you can download the source for the latest version at any time. If at some point you decide not to pay for support, their license allows you to keep working with what you have, binary or source. I think Atlassian as a company have taken a very enlightened approach to this issue, and I have no qualms in paying for their excellent software. Most of the issues I would have with closed source proprietary solutions are not an issue. You are free to tinker, just not redistribute, and they give you the insurance policy, in source code, that you can keep going should there ever be an issue with them as a company.

FSF has a great page of testimonies

[ciaran_o_riordan]

This gets much less attention than it deserves:

http://www.fsf.org/working-together/whos-using-free-software

Testimonies from Cern, NYSE, the EU, Wikipedia, and the US Department of Defense, plus another page of testimonies from individuals:

http://www.fsf.org/working-together/profiles/meet-the-free-software-community

Re:Stallman's answer

[Beelzebud]

Yeah except for that small detail about Stallman actually contributing something positive to the world. You may not like the guy's opinions, but he's contributed greatly to the world in the form of being one of the pioneers of the entire free software movement. Putting him in the category of a Michael Savage is not only completely unfair, but also just plain ignorant.

Re:It's tougher than you think...

[homesnatch]

To be fair, Excel did not support more than 65k rows until Excel 2010.