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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?"
My problem has been convincing them that they con't just pass of the cost of Windows to the customer. They like the fact that they can hire 3-4 MCSEs for the cost of one good Unix admin, but they don't realize that the Unix admin can set things up so that maintenance is much easier.
Windows is ingrained in business culture here, for the most part.
Free. Thats really all that is required here, but then I work for a bunch of cheapskates who won't be around much longer.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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
I once asked Richard Stallman how to convince my school to go with FOSS instead of Windows, since most of our CS lab was on Windows.
His reply: "Defenestration! Throw Windows out of the computer, or throw the computer out the window!"
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Might I suggest Liferay (http://www.liferay.com)? Open source, but also commercial, and more featureful than both Plone and Confluence.
You've obviously decided which piece of software you want to recommend even though the only reason you can think of to recommend it is that it is FOSS? If the open software isn't as good it just isn't as good; just because it's FOSS doesn't mean that it is the be all and end all to solve your problems. Compare features, stability, cost, and support; if your boss is actively against FOSS make a point to explain it's advantages (and disadvantages if you want to be fair) and leave the decision to him. After all, it's entirely possible that the closed, proprietary solution fits your situation better; basically, its dishonest to make your decision and then go digging specifically for evidence to support that decision.
Protection against lock-in is something employers understand the value of.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I speak only from my works own dynamics - If opensource software was to appear on work machines(lets say an open office variant) it would last as long as one of our managers receiving a docx from some outside manager with fancy things(annotations, drawings) and the ensuing discussions as they work out they are not looking at the same thing. The manifestation for me it the manager would turn up at my desk with his "look of death" and the question would begin "Can you tell me why...." Been there, done that. The whole thing falls like a deck of cards.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
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
Confluence integrates with Jira. I like and can't argue against it.
I've never used Plone, but as the old cliché goes, best tool for the job.
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.
Perhaps the question you should be asking is, cost aside, which would better suit your needs? Sure FOSS is great but if there is a better fit for your needs and someone else is going to foot the bill, who are you to say that management is looking in the wrong direction? I, for one, believe that there is a place for both commercial and FOSS in the business (and in the home for that matter). Perhaps a cost-benefit analysis needs to be done. Ultimately the decision needs to suit the needs of the business and not the ideals of the employees.
.sig
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?
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
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Keep it simple stupid - there is the old saying that no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
What never gets added is that people have gotten fired for going above and beyond to advocate for FOSS and then got fired when there was a show-stopping problem (which can happen no matter what new scheme you bring in).
FOSS has it's time and place, but *you* sticking your neck out trying to jam in FOSS into an environment that is not culturally ready for it is just asking for being the center of a CYA shitstorm.
I'm guessing that a bunch of people on slashdot have been severely stung from drinking the kool-aid. It hurts the company, the boob that was a advocate instead of a advisor, and most of all it hurts FOSS.
Don't push, FOSS will get there on it's own schedule.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
If you want to make a solid business case, you need to approach it objectively; what option will cost the least, in the short, medium and long term?
Maybe it's OSS, maybe it's not. But drop your bias right now before you research associated costs.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Actually, I'd go with Confluence. It's not OSS, but it's and awesome Wiki. Choose what's the best tool for the job, not what suits your religion.
1. Written in Java, which means you're more likely to have on-site language expertise in case something goes seriously awry (you get the source when you buy a license).
2. Lots of support available, as it's the most popular enterprise wiki system.
3. Integrates with SharePoint, which for many places is a must-have.
Basically, Atlassian focuses on the enterprise market, and it shows. Best tool for the job, etc.
That might be true, but in my experience the "support" you get from commercial CMS vendors is pretty much worthless. So if we assume that the FOSS support is equally worthless, at the very least FOSS gives you the advantage that you don't have to go through the vendor if there are bugs or other tweaks you want made.
Breakfast served all day!
We use Confluence at work (as well as a bunch of other tools from Atlassian). It's ok, but it's search functionality has much to be desired (at least it's not as bad as JIRA's search functionality). What's wrong with using MediaWiki (the engine behind Wikipedia)?
Depending on corporate culture(and the exact policies RE: demos of the proprietary vendor) cost can actually be a huge factor; but not for the obvious "cheap=better" reason.
In some institutional cultures there is a surprising power(assuming you don't step on the wrong toes) in Just Fucking Doing It. Obviously, unless you have really impressive guts and not too much sense, this doesn't mean putting a production server on an internet facing IP and hacking the company's DNS records to point to it; but showing up with a solid, functioning demo that everyone can gather around the projector and poke around at on their laptops can really sell something.
If a proprietary product isn't either available as a free demo version, and not through some subscription program you have to sign up for, or so expensive that the company will send a guy in a nice suit to do the demo, hand out some swag, and give everyone a really nice handshake, doing that with a proprietary product is hard and/or illegal.
Doing it with a FOSS(or freeware, admittedly) product is easy. You just throw something together in a VM and show it off.
That was my experience when I was trying to convince my employer to drop sharepoint for a wiki. They weren't turned off by the cost of sharepoint; but the fact that I was able to ask my boss for some time at one of our department meetings, get behind the projector and say "Hey, I threw this demo together in a weekend and put in some example content so you can get an idea of how we would use it. Easy web interface, versioning, strong ability to create links between otherwise disparate pieces of technical knowledge, check it out at $INTERNAL_IP..." Everyone pulled out their laptops, poked around a bit, there was some discussion, and the boss green-lighted it.
Had I given a speech about how we had to, like, fight the proprietary power, man, it would have gone nowhere. However, being able to just sit down, turn on, and show off, all without any serious backing or funding(because everything was free) allowed me to go from "nothing" to "green light-full production status". "Free" never entered into it in a hard financial way. However, had it not been free, I couldn't have done what I did. Now, Anecdote doesn't equal data, much less proof; but it is something to consider.
Mod parent up!
This strikes me as genuinely useful advice.
First, simply walking down a checklist tells you nothing about how WELL those features are implemented.
Second, it appears that the Confluence entry is only about 58% complete. Thus, many of the comparisons made assume that Plone wins by default.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Your real question is:
Convincing Your Employer To Go With Plone?
The answer to this depends on how good your organization is with Zope/Python. If you have onsite developers with Zope knowledge (who can support Plone), Plone is a no-brainer. And if you have developers familiar with other OOS software like Java, you have plenty of other products to choose from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Open_source_content_management_systems
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
If you don't have any onsite development staff, the value proposition of OSS/Plone goes down because you will presumably have to hire someone to run it.
Frankly, that's what I would stress. If this is a large enough project you're going to have to hire someone to run it anyway. You can save on software costs by hiring someone who knows Plone.
If you're not hiring new staff it boils down to who within your organization is running the CMS and what THEY want. Most other considerations are relatively trivial. The more "out of the box" they need the software to be, the more that leans towards a proprietary solution. They might also want to be able to have a vendor to complain to and to provide direct support, again, proprietary has an edge here.
Popularity also factors in. I don't really know how popular Plone is, but Confluence is really popular. That means there will be lots of online resources (forums, FAQs, etc.) for Confluence that you might not find for Plone.
Check out Confluence -- apparently it works ok.
Unfortunately, I can't help you there. We were rather underutilizing the sharepoint setup, as little more than a glorified shared drive, only with more annoying complexity.
That, combined with the fact that virtually all the document production of the department is lightly formatted near-plaintext technical documentation, with the occasional screenshot and hyperlink, also had a lot to do with making the pitch successful. Had we been 100% behind sharepoint at the time, it almost certainly would have failed. However, since we weren't putting too much effort into gettting the most out of any document management setup, I was able to sell the wiki(ended up being dokuwiki, I think) as a great "80/20 solution". Sharepoint would give you more features(and I freely acknowledged that); but required a greater level of work and buy-in than the department was giving it. The wiki would give us 80ish% of the benefits for 20% of the effort.
So far, that has been largely true. For a department of our size, the wiki lives on a tiny little VM, not consuming any CALs or licences or anything, gives us versioning and attribution for the mostly plaintext documentation/links/screenshots stuff, and supports links to an SMB share where we can store installers and documents that absolutely have to be in Word, and so forth.
Not quite as seamless; but it was fast, easy, and cheap. The fact that I could go from "nothing" to "full demo" in a little bit of spare time just helped drive that home.
Tits.
Seriously. Thats all you need to do. Hire a stripper and write Plone across her tits. Show it to your boss.
You don't understand business if you try logic and reason.
Actually, it is YOU who should go invent your own phrase, and YOU who is wrong. Open has a clearly defined meaning in English, and the OSI and FSF have no mandate to redefine the language. What you refer to is more adequately called Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) because it doesn't try to redefine the common vernacular.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Go-oo.org is a fork managed by some folks at Novell that incorporates multiple patches that haven't made it into the main branch yet. One of those is exceeding 65K rows (now 1048576). It's not in the main branch because there are apparently some problems with calculation performance with many rows and some problems with positioning with drawing objects. More details in http://kohei.us/2010/02/20/increasing-calcs-row-limit-to-1-million/
fencepost
just a little off
Point out that the vendor can and will kill off a product and support for that product OR charge like a wounded bull for specialised support OR that the company may fold, and that they are not legally obligated to continue a product that the company may become dependent up. Then point out that in the case of open source, it is possible to hire someone to develop the product further and support it, and that even if there is a cost penalty it won't be extortionate.
All other arguments are a waste of time for mission critical applications. Open source may or may not be cheaper.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's definitely not cost.
In Corporate IT budget terms, Confluence is free. A manager can purchase a couple hundred users worth of licenses on the corporate credit card. And it's supported. Hell, that's pretty much the Atlassian model. Stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap, and make 'em pretty.
I think the parent is dead on. If you have your heart set on plone (I've used it, it's acceptable - won't bring many tears of sorrow or joy) the parent is right. Just do it. If asked to compare to confluence, you want to find some practical reason Confluence is worse - some security thing would be ideal - but end up with a "look, this is easy, it's done, and it's free" kind of play. "We could do Confluence, but it does cost some money and it's pretty much the same thing. I don't see a compelling reason to pay for it."
However, if your boss really values support (a "throat to choke") you'll want to know what it'll cost to pay someone to provide you a Plone support contract. Plone.net has some providers listed. In the US, I'd start with http://www.enfoldsystems.com/ .
More anecdote, but a very similar result at my current employer. FOSS was accepted by quietly proving itself in a small corner of a quiet department. Dokuwiki, then LAPP. Now the higher ups are inquiring on savings for building a FOSS based cms for company wide use instead of server 2k8/sharepoint. Grass roots.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one