Indeed, there are great content
management systems (CMS) available. The process of selecting an apt CMS that
best suits one Business prospective is de facto a tedious task to carry out. Every
Business requires a solution that addresses the challenges in present and is
better aligned to ever changing dynamic business needs to make it future proof.
There are a number of major factors and aspects that equip us with to take an
informed decision from the available open source solutions.
The major aspects that are
considered and come very frequently de facto are:
Support & Stability
The massive community size of the
open source vendor is one of the best factors; we should look forward to before
making a decision. There are other factors that add up to the decision making
are; how large are their forums, how well are there documentation and what are
the support options available.
The proprietary systems are
preferred over open source just because of the fact that they offer 24/7
support and thereby is most considerable aspects among the folk. There is
another prospect of open source which we are not aware of, that some of them
offer similar support as proprietary systems do. There are popular proprietary
systems like Jahia, Hippo and Magnolia which
offer open source versions of their products as well.
The large community of Open
Source and their large forums provides thousands of advanced functionalities,
documentation, technical articles and people help us to fix the issues and
extending the functionalities.
The large community of open
source system and availability of code to outside world; helps developers
around the world in extending and improving it. This helps identifying the
anomalies and rectifying it for being used by the community. It leads to
production of innovative tools, technologies, solutions, infrastructure and
benchmarking best practices. Which is not in case of proprietary systems as it
is motivated by a single owner.
Flexibility and Customization
Expanding a proprietary system is
de facto more difficult due to the unavailability of freely available code.
Using an Open Source System one can do Research & Development to produce
Products & Services that can facilitate and support mission-critical
business functions.
Before making a selection to any
open source systems, we should analyze their documentation, best practices and
coding standards they follow. What is the release process they follow before
publishing any plugins or modules to the community? How frequently the products
and services are being updated. Changelogs of the product blogs are another
parameter for it as less updated products and services may have potential risk
of making the system vulnerable.
Security
Security is the first and
foremost factor, which the industry folk emphasize the most. It’s a common
perception that Open Source systems have potentially risk to security threats
by an adversary.
AugusteKerckhoff’s Principle in late 19th century gave his opinion in
context of design principles for cipher, one of the most important was:
The cipher method must not be required to be secret, and it must be
able to fall into the hands of the enemy without inconvenience.
Today, Kerckhoff’s Principle is
understood advocating the published designs as it go public scrutiny and are
therefore likely to be stronger. Thereby security is much higher after it has
been extensively studied and has withstood may attack attempts and known
publicly. As it is better that security flaws are revealed by ethical hackers
and made public than having the flaws known only to malicious parties.
Public design enables the
establishment of standards. It may be dangerous to use a proprietary system as
it is designed in secret by some organization. Thus it is easy to find exploits
in Open Source and becomes a strong point advocating that it is less likely to
be attacked as there are frequent security updates and patches by the community.
Cost
It is one of the most important
factors along with security in making a selection. It is also a common
misconception while giving preference to Open source over proprietary system
that it may cost less. It depends as the cost solely doesn’t depend on mere
selection of Open Source system. Cost depends on development, design,
management and deployment costs as well.
Open Source system provide a
basic infrastructure on top which it requires customization, whereas
proprietary system comes up with on the go solution and requires less
customization. The major cost associated with Open source system is that having
well versed developers and support costs and most of the training activities
can be learnt online at reasonable cost or at no cost.
In Proprietary system the cost lies in
licensing, training, development and support.
Not only Proprietary systems should be given preference but
also Open Source systems may fit the business needs and will remain an apt
alternative to it.
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