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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?"
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.
Graham
Might I suggest Liferay (http://www.liferay.com)? Open source, but also commercial, and more featureful than both Plone and Confluence.
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.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
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.
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.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
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.
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.