the ultimate online exercise system!

Over the years, we’ve been keeping a very close eye on open-source content management systems, wikis and other collaboration platforms. Finally, about 18 months ago, we took the plunge and set up our extranet using open-source software (switching away from a Microsoft SharePoint-hosted site in the process).

We had some hiccups (actually, that should be hiccoughs, but who writes it like that nowadays…) in the early stages. But the quality of the software improved in leaps and bounds, and the platform is now rock-solid, highly dependable and very easy to use.

As the open-source movement has gained traction and found models that sustain commercial survival, a number of major players have emerged. The systems we keep a very close eye on are:

Alfresco, Plone, Mindtouch Deki Wiki, Metadot and Liferay Social Office. Worth a mention is also O3spaces, the first of the open-source competitors to SharePoint (but the competition’s caught up, I fear!). Oh, and KnowledgeTree, too – also a very professional piece of work.

We now use two of these solutions in-house – both of them the "Community" versions, i.e. without paid-for support. But in fact, our experience of the open-source community (including, I may say, the developers) suggests that most issues can be resolved without spending hundreds of dollars/pounds/euros on expensive support calls. What’s more, very often the developers will spontaneously agree to add features or components suggested by users, because they’re potentially useful to business subscribers as well.

Our two solutions are Mindtouch Deki Wiki (now simply known as MindTouch), one of the easiest and most robust of the wiki-style solutions, and Metadot 7 (which we’re experimenting with as an intranet solution). In fact, both of these platforms are robust and easy to use (which is why we use them!). They both have strengths and weaknesses. The major strength of Metadot is the ease with which it can be customised. Although there are a few irritating aspects which have yet to be resolved, the ease with which you can tinker with CSS, layouts, coding etc. is remarkable.

MindTouch is nowhere near as easy to customise, and from that perspective can actually be very frustrating. But it’s massively powerful in a number of other ways. For example, file uploading is a doddle, thanks to flash-based multi-file uploading facilities. The page editor is beautifully integrated and very easy to use. And the mashup facilities are pretty much unparalleled (although they’re not quite as unique as MindTouch would like you to think; Metadot quietly supports mashups, too).

MindTouch also sports a very neat Desktop Connector, that allows you to interact with it through Windows Explorer (sadly not through other operating systems). This is an increasingly useful feature of the major collaborative platforms. The publication of the SharePoint protocol by Microsoft has given this aspect of the market a huge boost, and over the next few months we can expect to see a lot more solutions based on direct interaction between desktop and web server.

Alfresco and Plone have come on in leaps and bounds recently – especially Plone, which now has a very straightforward theme (skin) management function. Alfresco is one of the first open-source platforms to make use of Microsoft’s published SharePoint protocols, and offers a very nice – albeit somewhat simplistic – SharePoint alternative that actually works a lot faster than Microsoft’s original, although it’s not quite as sophisticated (or actually, it is, but the sophisticated functionality is managed through a completely different interface).

Both Alfresco and Plone are a little cumbersome to manage – more so than MindTouch or Metadot, which can be installed in a matter of minutes by a reasonably competent "power user". But a close eye needs to be kept on both, because they’re all evolving very rapidly, and Plone in particular has recently acquired some very elegant new features. The enthusiasm and vibrancy of the developer communities behind these products cannot be overstated.

Liferay Social Office benefits from support by Novell, and also offers a SharePoint-based function. Not quite as quick as Alfresco, Liferay nevertheless has some very nice features that bear investigation. We’ve played, and put it to one side for the time being. But that doesn’t mean we won’t play with it again in the future!

Also worth mentioning are Moodle (an educational system that is actually astonishingly powerful and customisable), and Cyn.in, which is a beautifully designed solution that suffers from the complexity of its underlying architecture (it’s based on Plone, which in turn is based on Zope… the result is a system that is gorgeous to look at, but achingly slow to use on anything but a very powerful server. If you’ve got one of those, however, you really ought to take a look – Cyn.in takes the desktop connection thing to a glorious extreme!).

It’s an exciting time to explore open-source collaboration tools, and over the next few weeks I’ll air our experiences with them in more detail. Keep well till then!