Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Is Bluenog’s Use of Open Source Sustainable?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

There have been some recent interesting posts discussing Bluenog, a company which sells the Bluenog ICE (integrated collaborative environment). This is a product consisting of a portal framework, content management system, a report generator, a wiki, and a calendar all working within a secured environment using a granular permission model and is capable of integrating with enterprise single sign-on systems. The system looks to be very Enterprise 2.0-ish and may provide a useful intranet environment that brings together the breadth of information needed by knowledge workers. I had a chance to look at the product at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference and talk with the company in an extended briefing. The product should get the attention of many IT managers.

While the Bluenog ICE product itself looks interesting, it is the business model the company uses to develop it that is causing a controversy and, in my opinion, raises some flags. Bluenog advertises itself as an open source company (or, rather, that is what most people walk away thinking when they have seen or read about the company). To be precise, here is what Bluenog says about their use of open source:

Bluenog ICE leverages several open source CMS, open source collaboration, open source portal and open source BI projects. These projects provide the building blocks for Bluenog ICE and allow us to provide tightly integrated solutions at a fraction of the cost of traditional alternatives.

The web page linked above lists a total of 19 open source projects as being used within the Bluenog product so, clearly, Bluenog is a consumer open source software. However, although the distinction may be subtle, the way Bluenog uses open source is different than what most enterprise IT managers may be expecting.

First, let’s be clear, Bluenog sells a proprietary product. Bluenog does not make the resulting source code of their commercial product available via an open source license. Paying customers get a copy of the source code but this offers none of the benefits, such as transparency and choice, that enterprises can gain from leveraging open source. What can you do with a copy of the source code? Open source becomes powerful when it is out in a community, gaining new features, getting security flaws fixed, etc.

Second, the only company that has benefited from Bluenog’s approach to open source is Bluenog itself, not its customers. But the sustainability of that benefit is questionable. Let me explain.

A number of the open source products used, which provide core ICE features, require significant changes to work in the Bluenog framework and these changes are not contributed to any sort of open source community. In essence, major parts of Bluenog are built from forks of open source products that are folded into their proprietary framework. Any enhancements or security patches from the originating open source community would have to be manually integrated into Bluenog because they are now separate products. For example, Bluenog is built with a version of the Hippo CMS that is one major version behind the main project.

So the question enterprises should be asking is this: Is Bluenog’s development model sustainable? Arguably, other companies have used open source this way. For example, IBM’s Lotus Symphony is based off an old version of Open Office. However, Bluenog is different for two reasons. First, Bluenog isn’t IBM. They are a startup and have limited resources. Second, they are creating a whole new integrated product based off of the amalgamation of several open source products, which sounds like a big integration challenge. IBM is re-basing the next release of Lotus Symphony on Open Office 3. Can Bluenog say the same about Hippo CMS? Do they care about future versions of Hippo CMS or are they content with keeping the older code, essentially turning these pieces into their own proprietary code?

If I were an enterprise IT manager considering Bluenog I wouldn’t let their use of open source sway me at all and evaluate them as a proprietary software vendor. I would also start asking questions about how they plan on sustaining the development of the product. Bluenog’s approach to using open source may have helped initially to get the first product out the door faster. However, the enterprise software market is a marathon not a sprint.

Register for "The Burton Group Guide to Saving Money On Communication, Collaboration, and Content Technology"

There's still time to register for our telebriefing tomorrow with replay and live Q&A on Wednesday.  Anyone facing budget concerns or trying to avoid them in the future with regard to communication, collaboration, and content technology will find this telebriefing valuable.

Here's the details:

7/7/2009 at 2:00 PM EDT / 11:00 AM PDT / 18:00 UTC/GMT / 20:00 CEST

OR

7/8/2009 at 9:00 AM EDT / 6:00 AM PDT / 13:00 UTC/GMT / 15:00 CEST

The Burton Group Guide to Saving Money On Communication, Collaboration, and Content Technology

07 Jul 2009 2:00 PM ET -- With the economy in recession, enterprise IT departments face pressure to trim their budgets and abandon some of what they wanted to accomplish. Cost cutting has a particularly hard impact on teams that are maintaining or seeking additional investments in communication, collaboration, and content management (3C) technology, given that their contributions to the bottom line are often indirect while their costs are easily quantifiable. This TeleBriefing with analysts Larry Cannell, Guy Creese, Bill Pray, and Craig Roth will describe where cost savings can be found with existing 3C infrastructure as well as how to meet new 3C needs with tighter budgets.

 

Clients can register for the telebriefing here.

ThinkFree Behind the Firewall; Zoho for SharePoint

Yesterday was "news rich" in the productivity suite market. Two small vendors, ThinkFree and Zoho, made interesting announcements.

Blogger: Guy Creese

ThinkFree released its ThinkFree Server Enterprise solution on June 22 and announced it on June 23. Basically, this allows an enterprise to take ThinkFree's SaaS productivity suite/document sharing solution and install it on an internal server behind the firewall.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on June 23, Zoho announced Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint. The e-mail I got from the PR person says,

This add-on, when installed on a Microsoft SharePoint Server, integrates Zoho Office Suite with Microsoft SharePoint.

The add-on provides users with the following functionality:

• Create new documents and save them to SharePoint in MS Office formats.
• View existing documents within SharePoint using Zoho Apps (Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show).
• Edit existing documents with Zoho Apps and save them back to SharePoint.
• Provides collaborative editing capabilities based on SharePoint's sharing permissions.

You can find more information about it in a post on the Zoho blog.

Via a server-side install, this connects Zoho to a document sharing/management application, similar to Google Apps, Microsoft Office/SharePoint, and ThinkFree--a capability that isn't offered by Corel, IBM, Novell, or Sun.

If you've been poking around, looking for alternatives to Microsoft Office/SharePoint, these are both worth looking at. With the entrance of Adobe into this space earlier in the month, the options just keep getting better and better.

Looking for People to Interview on Productivity Suites

Blogger: Guy Creese

As I hinted in yesterday's post, I'm writing a quadrant report on office productivity suites. The list includes:

• Corel WordPerfect Office
• Google Apps, Premier Edition
• IBM Lotus Symphony
• Microsoft Office
• OpenOffice.org
• OpenOffice.org, Novell Edition
• Sun StarOffice
• ThinkFree
• Zoho

While I've talked to some reference customers supplied by the vendors, I'd like to talk to some customers who haven't been cherry-picked. So if you're an IT manager responsible for purchasing one of the above packages and are willing to spend half an hour answering 36 questions, I'd like to talk to you.

The answers are confidential--I won't be using any customer names, and I won't be blabbing to the vendors--I just want to get a feel for what works and what doesn't. The questions cover things such as product quality, customer support, what's still wanting in features, etc. You can contact me at gcreese at burtongroup.com. Thanks for your help.

The $64,000 Question: Google Docs, Acrobat.com, or Other?

Blogger: Guy Creese

A week ago, ReadWriteWeb published an interesting poll, entitled, "Poll: Which Web Office Suite Would You Pay For? Adobe or Google?" At the moment, out of 519 votes cast, 22% (114 votes) were for Adobe, 38% (199 votes) were for Google, and the greatest percentage, 40% (206 votes) were for neither. A number of commenters took the article to task for failing to point out ThinkFree and Zoho, two startups that offer productivity suites. ReadWriteWeb replied, "...we intentionally left them out so as not to dilute the vote between the two companies that are arguably industry giants as opposed to (awesome!) startups."

The problem with such open polls is you never really know the survey universe--it could include some Adobe or Google employees, hoping to tilt the results; it could include many respondents from SMBs, rather than large enterprises; and so on. Probably the more interesting part of the article is the comments, as they highlight many of the viewpoints I hear from clients. Here is a sampling:

Blogger: Guy Creese

A week ago, ReadWriteWeb published an interesting poll, entitled, "Poll: Which Web Office Suite Would You Pay For? Adobe or Google?" At the moment, out of 519 votes cast, 22% (114 votes) were for Adobe, 38% (199 votes) were for Google, and the greatest percentage, 40% (206 votes) were for neither. A number of commenters took the article to task for failing to point out ThinkFree and Zoho, two startups that offer productivity suites. ReadWriteWeb replied, "...we intentionally left them out so as not to dilute the vote between the two companies that are arguably industry giants as opposed to (awesome!) startups."

The problem with such open polls is you never really know the survey universe--it could include some Adobe or Google employees, hoping to tilt the results; it could include many respondents from SMBs, rather than large enterprises; and so on. Probably the more interesting part of the article is the comments, as they highlight many of the viewpoints I hear from clients. Here is a sampling:

Acrobat.com: Needed to Boost Revenue

Blogger: Guy Creese

Adobe's announcement yesterday that revenue dropped 20% year over year adds some urgency to its move into the productivity suite/document sharing space. Sales have lagged for Creative Suite 4, its main suite for designers and graphic artists, and income from other areas--e.g., commercial use of Flash and AIR, enterprise purchases of its digital rights management, and increased use of Acrobat.com--would no doubt be welcome.

However, I'm not convinced Adobe will have easy going in this space. It has been selling enterprise software for awhile now (I'm thinking, for example, of its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite), but that's still a small portion of its business. Most IT groups don't yet think of Adobe as an IT solution provider. Cisco, HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, yes; Adobe, no. There are all kinds of things a vendor needs to rejigger--for example, licenses, support, and documentation--to be a true partner with IT departments. There are really no shortcuts here, as Google as discovered. It just takes time to get good at selling into IT departments, as well as develop the necessary infrastructure and ecosystem.

However, it isn't as if Adobe is completely behind the 8 ball, either. Flash and AIR make it know to development groups; it's been calling on security managers with its LifeCycle product; and it has a solid reputation with creative professionals. It certainly has brand recognition and goodwill going for it; it now just needs to flesh out the delivery and support logistics.

Note: Cross-posted on Pattern Finder.

Adobe Joins the Productivity Suite/Document Sharing Fray

Image via CrunchBase

Blogger: Guy Creese

This week Adobe Systems announced that Acrobat.com was coming off of beta and that it would offer two subscription types:

• Premium Basic: $14.99 per month or $149 per year, allowing web conferences for up to five people and the conversion of 10 documents/month to PDF.
• Premium Plus: $39.00 per month or $399 per year, allowing web conferences for up to 20 people and the conversion of an unlimited number of documents to PDF.

Adobe is also offering previews of two document processing applications--a spreadsheet application (Tables) and a presentation application (Presentations)--that will ultimately join the Buzzword word processor.

Coverage of the announcement includes:

• InformationWeek, "Adobe Launches Acrobat.com Out Of Beta"
• PC World, "Adobe's Acrobat.com Collaboration Services Emerge from Beta"
  
• The Wall Street Journal, "Adobe to Charge for Acrobat.com"

Adobe thus joins vendors such as Google, Microsoft, ThinkFree, and Zoho that currently offer (or have publicly stated that they will offer) online productivity suites allied with document sharing.

The "heating up" of this space is why I'm currently at work on a Burton Group Market InSight (i.e., quadrant report) on productivity applications. At this point, it's difficult to understand the players without a scorecard--so I'm building the scorecard.

Economy Impacts Content Localization Decisions

Blogger: Craig Roth

The Global Watchtower reported on companies that had localized their websites changing their minds:

Recently, we’ve noticed two reports of companies claiming that “it just isn’t worth it” to have websites in other languages. Last week, the New York Times profiled several web-based businesses that elected to decrease or eliminate their web presence in some parts of the world, in spite of popularity in the local markets. This weekend, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Home Depot is shutting down its Spanish-language site. This begs the question, “Is it ever a bad idea to localize?”

I have heard such questions from clients as well.  One client asked yesterday in which countries they can get away with just using English content inside the company for companywide policy information.  I pointed the client to the Ethnologue, a great source of information on the 7,299 languages they cover and where they are spoken.

However, Global Watchtower doesn't state the reason that I suspect for this abandonment of extra localized websites: the economic downturn.  It hints at cases where "the business case simply does not justify localization", but let's face it - there's one big reason that business cases have changed recently and that's the economy. As I wrote back in April ("The Hemline Index Redux"), projects that used to get approved with only "soft" benefits are now requiring "hard" proof of benefit. If your website isn't e-commerce, the cost/benefit equation for localizing is difficult to calculate.  Well, actually the cost is easy to calculate.  But the benefit of having, for example, a customer service website translated and localized for a country where 70% of your customers speak English at a moderate level of fluency is very difficult to determine.

If I'm right, we'll continue to see more organizations trimmed back on the number of localized versions of their websites until the economy improves, then see a reversal of interest in the languages, customs, and local differences of target audiences in other countries.

Is Your Website Irrelevant?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Robin Hamman makes some really good points in his post “Your corporate website is irrelevant.”

Twentieth century corporate structures, which, to borrow sentiment, if not words from Lee Bryant, put the World's window upon your organisation in the hands of the IT guys in the basement and the marketing department are crumbling under the weight of peer-to-peer recommendations and reviews, consumers tweeting about their experiences, audiences creating their own groups on facebook, and outraged citizens discussing the expense claims of MPs on blogs.

This is similar to what we said in our Burton Group Report “Web Content Management Systems: Managing Web Presence in a 2.0 World.” Thinking your website is the only place a customer can get information about your company may be a very naive position to take.

However, while I agree with Robin that a standalone website is likely to be less important today and enterprises need to consider their entire web presence, I wouldn’t go so far and say all companies need to have a presence on social networking sites. For many companies a presence on Facebook, for example, makes a great deal of sense. But for many others it may not. For example, a supplier whose primary customers are automotive companies might be better off to focus on localization of their web content (in particular provide English, German, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese versions of their content) than to start a Facebook fan page.

I think the advice Chuck Hollis gave in a blog post entitled “Does It Make Sense To Have A Corporate Presence On (insert name of popular social platform here)?” applies well here:

You know, if someone asked me "does it make sense to go to Cleveland?", I'd have to ask the obvious question -- why do you think you need to go to Cleveland?

There's an implied context here of goals and objectives that serve as a framework for any decision we might make about anything. I'd encourage people to think in these broader terms of what we might want to get done, rather than the pros or cons of any particular social platform.

When You're a Productivity Suite, Everything's a Nail

Blogger: Craig Roth

One of the arguments that many alternate productivity suite vendors have made is that most users of Office are not power users and don't need all the complex functionality it provides.  These basic users just want the ability to create simple documents, spreadsheets, and presentations and the unneeded complexity of Office makes Office bloated, overly complex, and too expensive.  Guy Creese summed it up well:

Both sides of this argument are wrong: Microsoft saying that you need to overbuy because you never know when a worker might need a certain feature (true, but not as often as Microsoft claims); Google, IBM, and Sun saying that you don't need all that functionality (actually, sometimes you do).

In thinking through some common productivity use cases with Guy for some upcoming research he's doing on productivity suites, it occurred to me that an argument could be made that certain complex features should be left out not because they're infrequently needed, but because they don't belong in that tool in the first place. 

Microsoft has given the world three hammers in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and now every content situation looks like a nail to information workers weaned on these tools.  They are very generalized tools and have been expanding in functionality to incorporate many situations that other tools would be better for.

To give just a few examples I often see:

• Excel as a database and reporting tool.  It's not uncommon to see spreadsheets with thousands of rows being maintained and various tricks to get summary data out of them and enable multiple users to input data into it.  Isn't that what simple end-user databases are supposed to do for you?
• PowerPoint as a photo slide show.  I keep getting .pps files with slide shows of funny pictures or inspirational images, one .jpg per slide.  Why?  Just to save the trouble of someone figuring out how to use a zip file of .jpgs?
• Excel as business intelligence tool. Excel is often cited as the #1 BI tool.  Depending on how high-falutin' your definition of BI is (and mine stretches to OLAP), shouldn't you just use a BI tool if that's what you want to do?
• Word or PowerPoint as a page layout tool.  Want to create a greeting card?  Or do fancy layout of a newsletter?  That's why there's a category of software for doing page layout and publishing, ranging from consumer-level to professional. 

While there's no doubt sometimes people stretch tools too far simply because they are familiar with them, it shows forethought and flexibility when new uses for a tool keep cropping up.  Specialized tools can be expensive and require learning yet one more interface.

Ultimately, this is just one facet of the "which tool to use?" problem I outlined previously, and it extends to most tools in the information worker toolbelt, from using e-mail for collaboration instead of a collaborative workspace to collating changes in Word docs instead of using a wiki.