I am mightily pleased that it looks like, finally, the UK is waking up to FOSS. According to this press release from the Enterprise Content Management company Alfreso they have seen a rather dramatic swing:

Alfresco Software today announced that despite the global economic downturn, it has witnessed record levels of customer adoption in the UK as businesses rethink their proprietary software strategies, turning to more cost effective and scalable open source alternatives.

They go on to describe some the new customer roll-outs and just what a significant chnage they have witnessed in the recent past [emphasis mine]:

“The world is undergoing serious economic turbulence, but at a time when businesses know they cannot simply terminate IT projects, open source software provides the perfect solution,” explained John Powell, CEO, Alfresco Software.  “By resisting the demands of monopolist proprietary vendors, organizations in both the UK’s public and private sectors are reaping the benefits of creating flexible and scalable infrastructures while lowering their overall IT spend.  Open source powers the internet today and that low cost scalability is coming to UK enterprises. Today the agenda is reducing cost and improving productivity with the resources you have. Alfresco has just recorded its most successful ever quarter and we’re looking forward to continuing that success through 2009.”

That’s great news. I’m really pleased for Alfresco, who release their excellent product under the GPL and have built a solid community behind them. And I’m also even more pleased for the businesses who are seeing the true value that can be obtained from Free Software.

Their competitors, who haven’t yet discovered the value of FOSS, could be getting a very rude awakening over the coming months and years as those that have begin to reap the rewards of massively reduced costs, freedom from vendor lock-in and the upgrade-treadmill the proprietary vendors so love you to run on start to pull away. How much more flexible and agile will a business be when it gets the freedom to decide from whom, and what software products, to purchase or use?

Just perhaps, the times they are a changing…

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For most of the readership of this blog it will come as no surprise that Open Source is a bloody great way to avoid spending money on software. That’s a very simple argument and one that has merit. But clearly capital cost isn’t the only answer and replacing existing infrastructure with something new, even if it is free, can be costly in other ways.

So are there other benefits and factors where Open Source Software solutions can be of distinct benefit in these rather troubled times?

Well I think there are, and I’ve dumped some of my rather random thoughts down here. I’d love to hear your opinion on them and get any other suggestions you may have too:

• To me, a major benefit of OSS to a business is when they are looking to deploy a new solution or service. Be it a CRM, or ERP, or perhaps their business model has changed and they need to actually do something fundamentally different to survive. Deploying OSS in this scenario is almost a no-brainer. You will have to pay to integrate this new service to some degree whatever solution you select; so why not use a free one and one that gives you an ability to adapt and change features in a far simpler way than with a proprietary system?
• But now, cash is really tight. It is even more important that your business gets every penny it can from any investment it makes. So there may be an even simpler argument: If you can’t afford to invest in a proprietary software solution but you can get similar functionality from a free OSS solution, can you really afford NOT to go down the OSS route? Your competitors probably will.
• Is OSS now the ONLY choice for the cash-strapped business? You can’t stand still. You have to do something to generate more leads/revenue/cash flow or improve operating efficiency etc. Standing still in our current climate is equivalent to going backwards in a growth economy.
• Vista bashing? Many firms will probably be getting close to needing an upgrade cycle on their desktops. Do they go Vista? There are a whole world of reason why not too, including performance, reliability, security and the need to upgrade hardware. Is OSS ready for the Desktop. Personally I think so; but does Joe Blogs? Can they be convinced? We are certainly hearing more positive noises in this direction but is it a step-too-far? The costs of replacing your desktop licenses is going to be pretty steep.
• How about bringing certain tasks back in-house? Many businesses will outsource to external companies specific jobs or functions that they use on a regular basis. By deploying OSS in-house, could they do some of this work themselves and save money, speed up the process, become more efficient? I’m thinking of these sort of things: basic graphics work, PDF creation, page layout, web design/maintenance. There’s no cost to download and install The Gimp, Inkscape, OpenOffice.org or Scribus. Moving a web site to a decent CMS like Joomla! from a hard-coded site (that you have to go back to your web designer every time you want content changed) could provide longer term benefits although this would require some up front cost.
• Security. Is it a big deal for most SMEs? It doesn’t crop up that much in discussion. So I don’t think it is an area to major on. Do you? Clearly there are big advantages to using OSS (Linux) on the desktop for protection from almost all malware. But with existing infrastructure protected by AV, Firewalls, filters and IDS etc, is it worth changing? For it’s own sake probably not, but as part of a bigger overhaul, probably.
• Servers and networked services. With M$’s release of Windows Server 2008^(tm), is there an opportunity to promote the OSS alternative? Again, upgrades are not going to be cheap. Current VAR expertise will be limited with the new platform so where is the downside to using OSS based servers instead? Free, secure, immensely flexible and scalable. We have just seen Alfresco announce that their Open Source ECM now fully supports Microsoft’s Sharepoint stack. The big benefit here is in keeping your businesses’ documents on an open platform. Not locked inside a proprietary M$ one where you will be forever asked to pay to get continued access to your data.

That’s it for now. If you got this far, thanks!

I’d like to think this might become a short series of posts if we can get more and better ideas from you too.

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In brief, Quickr is a website creating tool, each site is known as a “place” and within a place you can have folders and rooms. Rooms are like sub-places, they can have their own access control rules and a different style. They can contain rooms as well so you can have a hierarchy of places. It looks quite pretty, and 10 years ago it was 5 years ahead of its time. It has now got a client install, which integrates with some legacy Windows applications, more on that later.

Alfresco is an Open Source Enterprise Content Management System, which runs as a J2EE application on Linux and other platforms (I would stick to Linux+Apache+Tomcat+MySQL for preference). Like Quickr you create areas for storing stuff, in Alfresco they are called “Spaces”. Spaces can contain files, folders and more spaces.

Inheritance of security to sub-spaces/rooms

So in Quickr you create a place, you add members to that place, you create a room within the place, you carefully check the checkbox labled “inherit members from parent place” as you create it so that all the members of the place can get into the room. Lovely. Now add another member to the place. You would expect them to be able to access the room wouldn’t you?

No. Inheritance is a one shot deal when you create a room, it just copies the access control list from the parent room as it creates the subroom. Now imagine an place in an enterprise with 100+ rooms and managing user access to this lot. It gets messy.

In Alfresco, inheritance works just like it should. You can set a space to inherit from the parent space, and override it at will. Nice, friendly and fit for the enterprise user/administrator.

Access as a file system

The big new feature in Quickr (the pretty skins don’t count as they are only skin deep) is the Quickr Connectors. This Windows only program installs as a Windows Explorer extension and sits alongside the network neighborhood, it sort of works like a filesystem.

You can’t do linked spreadsheets (OpenOffice.org or Symphony, or the other one) because the files don’t reside at a resolveable UNC path.

Folders are deeply broken. You can create folders, and nested folders, but they look rubbish in most of the web themes which are designed for a single level of folders. If you do use a web theme with a hierachical folder tree and then use the web interface to move folders between rooms, they break in the connector. Moving them in the web doesn’t update some important UNID field somewhere, I couldn’t figure out which, but I reported it as a bug.

Personal spaces (aka Quickr Entry) were supposed to be a wonderful thing, when you send an email with an attachment from a proprietary email client (Lotus Notes or the other one) it asks you if you want to store the attachment in your Quickr place and send a link instead. This sort of works. With no security. Your place is public, anyone can see stuff you put in it (with a lame security-by-obscurity option which I haven’t figured out how to get to yet). So you want to organise your space, putting stuff in folders etc. well you can’t. Folders aren’t allowed in personal spaces. Tough.

So how does file system access work in Alfresco? Well it will act as a WebDav server or a CIFS server or both. There is no mucking about with locally installed connector clients and Windows Explorer extensions to make it look a little bit like a network filesystem. It is a network filesystem. WebDAV is well supported on Linux and Mac and it works on Windows too. Once you connect to your server via WebDAV it just looks like another bit of your filesystem. You can drag and drop documents into and out of it, double click things to open them etc. Linked spreadsheets work fine, and in fact every application that expects to be storing or accessing data on a regular drive works just fine with your remote content management system. It isn’t just any remote drive though, it is still a content management system, if the business rules for a space where you drop a file dictate version control then that is exactly what happens.

Version control

So lets say you have a document in Quickr created with a form set up for optional version control (which is a bit of a sloppy concept in itself). You are doing some edits and what started as correcting a few typos turns into a major refactoring session. You now want to save your document as a new version. Tough. Too late. You have to create a new version before you start editing it, otherwise you are just editing and overwriting the existing version. Quickplace always had a published version + working draft system, it now has a sort of revision history stuffed into it. The two models don’t seem to like each other very much.

Version control in Alfresco is somewhat more thought out, it has a very powerful Advanced Versioning Manager, which can track back not just individual files, but directories, it can show you the state of the whole repository at a particular point in time. Very useful for the multiple linked spreadsheets example. It can do way more than this, it is configurable as

So what does work Bettr in Quickr?

Well Quickr has a truely sickening theme/skin engine. It only works in Internet Explorer with ActiveX and you can upload 6 files (stylesheet + 5 HTML files) which it scoops up along with any referenced images. The HTML files basically duplicate each other, or you can upload just one HTML file and have it guess what the others should look like. There is no community site to share and sell Quickr skins that I know of, unlike Joomla! and Wordpress etc. However, rubbish as the theme engine is, it is better than Alfresco which doesn’t yet have a skinning capability (you can edit the stylesheet and all the .jsp files, but that isn’t the same as a facility for uploading a package of skin elements so that places can be individually styled.)

Quickr isn’t just for storing files, it has a nice calendar that can show custom forms on it. I haven’t yet seen a calendar view for Alfresco. The Gantt chart view in Quickr isn’t very sophisticated at all, I wouldn’t miss that, but the calendar is useful.

When uploading files though the web interface from some Microsoft Office applications it does an ActiveX/COM control thing that gets the application to save as HTML as well as the native binary format and it uploads both the HTML version and the native format. It then serves up the HTML version to browser clients, which would be a nice trick. If it worked a bit better. It doesn’t do this trick if using the windows explorer integration, so if you use a mixture of the Quickr connector and the web client you get a great big muddle and a mess.

In conclusion

If I had to do a 15 minute sales demo, on Windows, I could easily make Quickr look fantastic, but when comparing Quickr against Alfresco as a serious tool for long term use in a modern business, Quickr falls short and Alfresco is the one I would choose.

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The report called the Open Source Barometer should be an absolutely fasciniating tool as Alfresco plan to issue it every six months. This should give a great insight into trends which are otherwise hard to identify.

The survey was carried out between April and June this year (2007) and the information was garnered from approximately 10,000 new members joining the Alfresco community.

Among the highlights revealed by the Open Source Barometer Report are:

• Operating systems: Surprisingly, users evaluated Alfresco as much on Windows as they did on different flavors of Linux, but they strongly preferred to deploy production systems on Linux. Windows plays an increasingly important role in testing and evaluation because it is the operating system on most desktops.
• Application servers: Users strongly preferred open source Tomcat or JBoss over the leading proprietary offerings from Sun, IBM and BEA, even in production environments.
• Databases: Overwhelmingly, users test and deploy on MySQL with PostgreSQL a surprisingly close second for both evaluations and production deployment. Oracle was the most popular proprietary choice among the proprietary databases.
• Browsers and portals: To access the Alfresco ECM repository, users preferred browsers over portals. And Firefox was the most popular choice among different browsers. When users selected a portal preference, 80 percent chose Liferay or JBoss Portal.

Also, another very interesting result from this survey seems to suggest that Novell’s alliance with Microsoft has done them no favours whatsoever… In fact whilst use of Red Hat Linux has more than doubled, Novell’s Suse Linux has remained flat.

For me one of the key findings is that while the report shows Windows is a popular evaluation platform for open-source software, most enterprises use Linux when they go into production. That says it all really

A fascinating and excellent report from a very high quality company.

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