Open source tries to make collaboration the differentiator

As the economy slips further into a recession, companies looking for ways to keep IT spending in check will begin to take a closer look at open-source alternatives. InfoWeek has a good story on how two open source packages, Drupal [1] and Alfresco [2], are hoping to gain more market share in the coming year by providing advanced collaboration tools as part of the standard offering.

Both have been working in the Web 2.0 space since their inception and that might give them an advantage over more traditional proprietary vendors who have only added Web 2.0 functionality in recent releases. They also can compete with Sharepoint, as the article states, especially Alfresco, which has built a Sharepoint alternative [3] that mimics Sharepoint's look, feel and functionality with an Alfresco content repository on the back end.

It's clear that as we move deeper into the recession, open source alternatives will look increasingly attractive, especially when they provide similar or better functionality than their proprietary counterparts. You can download either package for free and try it, then if you wish to implement it, purchase support and maintenance packages to make sure your open source software is running and tuned as it should be.

For more information:
- see the InfoWeek article [4]

Related Articles:
Gartner: 85 percent of companies using open source [5]
Alfresco Open Source Barometer report released [6]
Open source CMS market share report released [7]