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Guide CMS

Why Open Source?

by Guy Vigneault — last modified 2008-05-01 21:45

There are hundreds of commercial document management systems, some of them have matured well and cover the broadest requirements. There is a great opportunity for open source alternatives in document management due to the following factors: document management is a "€œhorizontal" solution (basically the same business requirements apply regardless of industry or size of companies); open standards are available; and commercial solutions are often expensive and quite complex.

There are a number of reasons why open source document management solutions should be considered when making decisions on what technology to use:

  • Open source reduces the cost of implementing and owning document management solutions because there are no or only small license costs. Support and maintenance costs are often substantially lower compared to commercial alternatives. Modest requirements for hardware, operating systems, databases, etc. allow for smaller investments for the overall implementation. Eliminating license fees also eliminates the disincentive to roll out the solution to more users and achieve wider spread adoption.
  • Open source inherently avoids vendor dependencies and lock-in. Open source projects focus on standard capabilities and allow for continuous operation even in the case the company or project behind the solution should decease. Due to its openness, skills and development resources are often broadly available and come at a lower cost compared to proprietary alternatives.
  • Open source drives for standards based solutions. Not only is the reference implementation of new standards in many cases an open source application (e.g. JackRabbit for JSR-170), open source projects also have a strong track record in adopting open standards quickly and adhering to them. Most open source document management applications, for example, support the Open Document Format standardized by OASIS. Organizations often have one or more content/document management solution already in place that have been deployed in a particular department to address very specific needs. As the organization moves towards having a company-wide DCM strategy, it becomes important for any new solution to be able to interoperate with existing solutions using industry standards.
  • Open source is proven within the infrastructure layer and provides a wealth of reusable components on all layers of the solution stack. Due to license restrictions, this advantage is frequently only open to solutions distributed under open source licenses. The efficiency of assembling applications from open source components was demonstrated by Alfresco. In only a few months a comprehensive document management solution was developed based on many different open source components (Jboss, Spring, Hibernate, OpenOffice, Lucene, etc.) and matured to a ready-for-production state.

There are clearly many benefits in using open source document management solutions. Besides the ones listed above, the openness of the code also allows for more flexible implementations. Document management solutions can contain features that are not for everyone and that require a certain organizational readiness. However, companies might want to add some of those features throughout a document management implementation process. Open source components are designed, developed, and tested in a highly modular way – the pieces are meant to be put together in assembly fashion. Open source projects anticipate customization, so processes like unit testing are built-in.