Thursday, May 8, 2008

"So, how do you make money?"

Of all the questions while I work our booth here at JavaOne [for Alfresco], the initial exchange typically looks like this:

"I see you guys are an Open Source CMS Alternative, cool... so, how do you make money?"

Sure, there were the subsequent functional questions, comparisons, tech topics, etc - but most people still don't have a baseline knowledge about pricing models in an open source world. Quite illuminating. I would have expected this to be the last question, or at least some rough analogies drawn by default to RedHat or MySQL (/Sun).

Open source may be disruptive on the technology front, but altering peoples' buying habits looks to take longer to sink in. Should be no surprise I suppose: behavioral change always takes the longest.

P.S. Alfresco uses a dual licensing model.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Speak softly and carry a big stick

Or better yet, let CMS Wire speak for you. Another great write-up on our latest release, Enterprise Edition 2.2 which contains
  • Web Application Preview and Test: provided users with the ability to preview in-context changes to any web application, including PHP, Ruby, JSF, Tiles, Struts, Groovy, and .NET
  • Web Farm Deployment Configuration: supports advanced deployment rules for scalable, 3-tier web application architectures with partitioned, replicated deployment
  • Site Templating and Branching: enable rapid creation of new sites from existing templates and the ability to baseline major site updates by branching existing site
  • Asset Reuse: allows updates and sharing of content across web projects
  • Email-based Collaboration: users can email directly into the repository and capture all discussions relating to a specific document
  • Email Archival: ability to automatically capture and archive all attached files and email messages
  • JMX-based Server Administration: JSR-160 support offers administrators access to Alfresco via a JMX console
More to come with 3.0 and beyond... take a look at the review, and as always download to try on your own!