Open Source

Random thoughts on Convergence

by

Next week, I will be at AIIM, participating in a panel on Convergence moderated by Tony Byrne. Here are some of the things that I’ve been thinking about convergence. They are not in any particular order (as the title of this post suggests) but are meant to generate some points and take take the discussion forward before the conference starts:

Read more

Goodbye 2006, Welcome 2007

by

2006 has been an exciting year for content technologies. Based on some of the interesting happenings, the following themes (in no particular order) have emerged that might have an impact on this space in coming years:

  1. Standards: or the lack of them was evident. Although portal standards (JSR-168, JSR-286) have done well, content management standards (JSR-170, JSR-283) have not done that well. Alfresco, Magnolia, Day and eXo support JSR-170 and there have been occasional talks of JSR-170 connectors for other products (e.g., BEA supports this using Day’s connectors). However, I think the acceptance has been below my expectations.

    Read more

Alfresco WCM Technology Preview

by

If you’ve worked with TeamSite, a lot of things in Alfresco’s WCM preview will look familiar. TeamSite’s workareas are Alfresco’s sandboxes. There are similarities in the usage of terms (virtualization, branching, minOccurs, maxOccurs etc) and other concepts too. But this is no coincidence given the fact that many people, including the VP of WCM come … Read more

From Vignette to OpenCMS

by

Based on a recent project for redeveloping a Vignette based site using OpenCMS, here are some observations:

OpenCMS is infinitely extensible even though it takes some time to figure out things. So, though there were technical challenges, all of them were sorted out.
One major area in which OpenCMS (and other open source products) lags behind Vignette (and other proprietary products) is the ability to replicate content. This has the following implications:

Read more

Apache releases Jetspeed 2.0

by

Apache announced Jetspeed 2.0. It is a major release and users of earlier versions will have to do some work for migrating to this version. Unlike previous version, it is fully compliant with JSR-168. In that sense, it can now compete better with Liferay and JBoss. An area where it scores over others is that … Read more

Open Source as a bridge between commercial products

by

I’ve come across this scenario multiple times. A company C1 merges with another company C2. C1’s corporate standard is CMS1 and C2’s is CMS2. Because of the merger, C1 has to eventually move its systems to CMS2. However, during the transition phase, which could be as long as 18 to 24 months, it is very expensive for them to maintain CMS1.

Read more

If you would like to get short takes directly in your mailbox, please do consider subscribing to my newsletter. I won’t spam you and your information will be safe. I usually send it like once a week (or once in 15 days).