A look at WhiteHouse.gov and why more IT shops are turning to open source

When the White House jumped on the open-source bandwagon and chose Drupal for managing the back-end of WhiteHouse.gov, the decision made headlines. Rob Klause, the man behind the Drupal transition, who has since left government to work for Siteworx, spoke about the decision to use Drupal at a Web Managers Roundtable in Washington, D.C. on March 25.

Once President Obama arrived at the White House, it was clear that the new administration had greater demands for connecting with constituents and using rich media. "We couldn't keep up with what the new media team wanted," Klause said.

The WhiteHouse.gov team needed a fully functional content management system with improved workflow and blogging features. Klause also wanted to be able to create new content types on the fly and add community-building features. Klause decided it would be helpful to go with a platform with an active and innovative community. "We needed a system with agility and to me, innovation happens in the open-source communities," explained Klause.

Once the team decided on Drupal, they were able to address one of their biggest problem areas: Slideshows. With the old CMS, slideshows were difficult to produce and hard for users to find.

"Reaching out to the Drupal community, we found there are quite a few models available to put together that slideshow component," said Klause. "It turns out that this community has taken that idea and run with it. They've not just done your slideshow, they've thought about it further." Some options provided by the Drupal community were the addition of video, text captions, making slideshows search engine optimization friendly and reusing slideshow content effectively across the site.

But having so many options can sometimes present another set of challenges. Tony Byrne, an analyst from the Real Story Group, which evaluates and compares content management technologies, cautioned that tools such as Drupal can be overwhelming for users.

"The thing that made [Drupal] different initially was that it was designed to be a community platform where visitors are authors. What's missing in all of that is the presence of 'enterprise-y' features," said Byrne. If users are looking for something, "most Drupal developers will tell you, 'Well, there's a module for that.' But you have to do your due diligence to make sure you choose those wisely."

Klause said that while there were savings associated with choosing Drupal over other platforms, the savings weren't as significant as he had expected. "We thought we would see tons of savings in terms of developer hours...we were looking more at configuration than coding. Still, review, testing and implementation takes time," he said. The biggest savings were actually gained from licensing benefits: Cost effectively scaling and adding sites, adding users, and being able to share the site as a template with other agencies.

Byrne, a self-professed open-source enthusiast, made a point to tell roundtable attendees that open-source should not be equated with "free." And increasingly, the lines between open source and more traditional, commercial CMS software are blurring.

"We're staring to see some commercial vendors take their code and throwing it out in open source. They're changing their model," said Byrne. "...A word of caution attached to that is that sometimes when companies do that there's a greater reason they're doing it besides just changing their business model." 

So, even if a product appears to be open source, enterprises may need paid consulting or support services in order to use the code effectively. Other times free code is available for an enterprise version, but then users have to pay for a more secure version.

While open source products and their communities have an undeniable "cool" factor, Byrne said there are times when "open source is not so cuddly." Users should use caution when there is:

• Poor project governance,
• An aversion to Microsoft Windows or Office,
• A confusing array of add-on modules,
• A global army of hackers targeting novice web enthusiasts, 
• A preference for technical richness over usability for normal people,
• Or comparatively high implementation costs.  

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