Open Source CMS as a corporate or company solution?
Many companies assign huge financial budgets for the development of their IT technology and infrastructure every single year. Most often these are immensely expensive corporate solutions. Meanwhile time has proven that the existing Open Source solutions for Content Management Systems allow to cut down the costs. Furthermore they are as effective as other commercial systems.
However most companies see Open Source technology the risky one as they wrongly assume free systems with very low quality. The truth is that commercial CMSes do not have such a great support from their users as their free equivalents do as they are used by greater number of people globally.
Most of Open Source content management systems are being developed by the developers from all over the world. It is quite an important detail as it is very common that companies have a CMS that does not have a multilingual feature. The idea of Open Source technology is that it provides a source code available for its users while it is high quality at the same time.
One of the most known CMSes that are Open Source is the Drupal platform.
It is a good solution for those who want to migrate from the paid products, such as Lotus Notes/Domino or Microsoft .NET, to the free ones. Drupal guarantees the same or sometimes even more features than commercial technologies while it does not demand the license fee.
Potential customers often are concerned about the lack of technical support and qualified experts who specialize in Open Source solutions. They also fear of some legal consequences or that free systems would disappear from the market. However, constant and intensive development of that kind of technologies decrease the risk to the minimum and, what is also crucial, it does not cause any legal complications.
If it comes to Open Source systems, the only expenses the customer has to pay are those for additional services, such as programming, implementation, configuration, new modules creation or CSS coding. Such solutions are often called "the turnkey systems".
Open Source CMS technology advantages:
- no license fee
- decent quality
- immediately available
- dynamic development
- safe and secure
According to the above advantages, the choice of Open Source CMS seems to be a very good decision.
It is worth mentioning that the cost of one hour of consulting in a big corporation may amount to huge numbers. Open Source solutions are the future. Their high quality and constant dynamic development make us believe that it is a matter of time for them to dominate the Polish market.
In the US, the best websites are created with the Drupal CMS. The exemplary websites that use Open Source technologies are The White House - Barack Obama website, the official site of Beyonce, Amnesty International, The Economist or MTV.
