Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS)

The proliferation of information has made enterprise content management a necessity for most organizations. Managing the growing amounts of content generated throughout the normal course of daily operations requires flexible, rapidly deployed solutions that transform traditional content repositories and static intranets into dynamic, user friendly work environments. However, content management solutions from proprietary vendors could be expensive for some organizations. Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) could be a solution when budget is an obstacle in implementing enterprise content management initiative.

Open source ECM solutions have matured over the past several years, equaling the capabilities of proprietary software, and have been successfully deployed in major enterprises worldwide. They can support web content management, document management, records and email management, and collaboration. Today’s leading commercial open source ECM solutions feature all of the capabilities that proprietary applications offer - from rules-based content repositories to collaboration features combined with enterprise-grade scalability, reliability, and security.

With an open source ECM implementation, companies can benefit from the stability and reliability of an enterprise-class system, while being able to redirect IT dollars to revenue-generating business functions. Given the limitations of email, shared network drives and proprietary software, enterprises can turn to a new wave of established alternatives - commercially supported, open source ECM applications that solve real business challenges. The advantages of a commercial open source approach are numerous, with flexibility, ease of integration and lower cost leading the list.

Open source CMS are Alfresco, Drupal, Joomla, Apache Jackrabbit, Liferay, and JBoss/eXo portal platforms, and many others.

In my future posts, I will describe these open source CMS.