Open Source CMS Edges Toward the Mainstream

There's a very interesting article on EContent Magazine on Open Source CMS moving towards Enterprise Content Managment.

Led by the growing popularity of the Linux, Open Source Movement has gained momentum, with an increasing number of open source content management products on the market . What separates companies such as Zope, Lenya , eZ publish, and Nuke from better-known counterparts at Documentum, Vignette, and Hummingbird is that the open source products (with a few exceptions) tend to focus solely on Web content management, rather than enterprise content management—but that doesn't mean at least some of them aren't making their way into the ECM space as well.

If you visit opensourcecms.com or cmsreview.com, you'll find hundreds of open source content management packages. Goodwin admits that quality can vary dramatically among the numerous packages, but he points out that many have caught on and are widely supported.

"Some of these open source CM systems are fantastic, while others are—how should I say this—less than stellar," says Goodwin. "Since there is generally no financial motivation for the initial creation of any open source CMS, the quality can be questionable. However," he says, "if the system becomes popular and more people and programmers become involved, the system generally gets better and better with each iteration. With any popular open source software, you'll continually capture better and more qualified eyeballs going over the code, making it stronger, leaner, and more secure."

The real strength of open source content management is that it reduces the overall cost of implementation, according to John Blossom, president and senior analyst at Shore Communications, Inc. "The big picture is that it means that virtually any company can have a sophisticated Web publishing infrastructure that takes content out of the realm of unstructured content for a fraction of what systems cost only a few years ago. The real money is in solving business problems far more sophisticated than these tools, but in the meantime these tools are revolutionizing the ability of sophisticated content to appear virtually anywhere online or in the enterprise," Blossom says.