We haven‘t heard a lot about Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) until now... In fact, until the launch of Alfresco. There is some buzz in the US online IT press, calling it "the first Open Source ECM project".
Well... it‘s interesting. Interesting because it put the words "ECM" and "Open Source" together for the first time in the IT analysts and IT press mouths. Interesting also because it is another step ahead for the strength and the public image of the open source model. Nowadays, Open Source software is powering the Internet. The whole Internet (your mail and most of your web pages are delivered by Open Source software, to be short but there is a lot more)... Isn‘t it sufficient? If you still have doubt about this model‘s viability, please read the following article from Marc Fleury : Is Open Source capitalism, socialism or communism?).
To be honest, I think it‘s really unfair to say that Alfresco is the first project that put open source software into the ECM arena. The truth is: Nuxeo wasn‘t founded by Documentum‘s or Interwoven‘s honchos, but... Nuxeo has been doing Open Source ECM since 4 years now! 4 years spent to imagine, create and build a strong ECM platform. In fact, I don‘t think you have to hire one of Documentum heads to do ECM! Has any company hired heads of Microsoft to create Linux? Apache? Sendmail? Postfix? or... MacOS X? Well, of course not (otherwise I wouldn‘t have write it, would I ? ;-), being one of Documentum‘s heads doesn‘t give your hands gold-making fingers (neither open source community management experience, by the way).
At Nuxeo, we have been doing open source ECM since 4 years now. CPS, an Open Source software that works in the real world for real customers. Not for VC. For customers. And we believe this is the main point. CPS is a global ECM platform with an amazing functional scope. And we are very proud of it. Please give this article a chance... I will try to explain the history of the CPS project, why it‘s really about ECM, what is our approach, our passion...
Web Content Management (WCM) describes applications that manage websites‘ content. It‘s all about pages, sections, and some services. WCM applications usually allow users to easily create and publish content on web sites / portals. The open source world is highly represented in this market with tools like Plone, Typo3, SPIP, Mambo, and hundreds more.
OTHO, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) addresses globally all document/knowledge related needs of an organization. ECM solutions are expected to manage all digital assets providing corresponding services (ex: indexing, search, workflow engine, archiving, business rules, collaboration, etc.). The final goal is to make all kind of information and tools to converge. Nowadays, information is the core value of companies: the convergence is a critical issue. Information needs to be managed, shared and leveraged to improve organizations‘ performance and value. That‘s our passion. We hope you will share it.
While open source WCM applications are very present, this is not the case for the ECM market, still very dominated by proprietary software vendors with customer-locking solutions (and one can imagine how difficult it would be to change the platform on which the whole information / knowledge management infrastructure is based on. CPS has been proving on the battle field that it offers a viable alternative to those solutions since 3 years.
CPS stands for Collaborative Portal Server and has much evolved since this name was given... Right now, CPS is basically a generic, extensible, standard-based, enterprise-grade global platform for managing digital resources. CPS is, at this time, the only open source software that can compete with major proprietary software within the ECM market.
CPS is composed by a core (CPS Platform) and many additional components. Here are the major features and components provided within CPS:
As you can see, CPS offers a very wide scope (both technically, as a framework, and functionally as an out-of-the-box applicative solution). It can deliver efficiently many ECM projects, from collaborative workspaces to pure document management, including business processes, specific services and web publishing portals.
The CPS project started 4 years ago, and the first public release, under the GPL, was CPS 2.0. At that time, CPS was focused on Content Management with a collaborative twist.
We then found out that our prospects and customers were looking for a stronger platform that could handle workflow-oriented large collaborative intranets and document management systems. Briefly, the market began to ask for a credible alternative to proprietary solutions available on the market at that time. We decided to stop CPS 2.0 development to create from scratch a robust, scalable, fully-extensible, component-based ECM platform that would be able to handle large document management projects, based on our previous experience.
Of course, CPS 3 wasn‘t able to address all ECM domains from the beginning, but its architecture was definitely designed following this vision. After the core was ready, we started to implement customers‘ projects using the platform. Each project has brought improvements and new features to the core platform (at the technical level or the functional level). CPS 3, with the release one years ago of CPS 3.2, is now a complete ECM platform that can compete with major proprietary vendors (Documentum, Interwoven or OpenText).
The upcoming release, CPS 3.4, offers a lot of improvements and adds highly innovative features in the ECM world (it will be the topic of a future post).
CPS is a Open Source project, supported by Nuxeo and an active community of developers and users :
CPS is used by many large and small IT companies that offer services on this platform (with or without a Nuxeo business partnership). We are very proud to create with this platform a dynamic ecosystem growing every day.
CPS providers are available in France, Europe and across the world:
Some large IT companies...
...and some smaller!
Supported by Nuxeo and a growing set of IT companies, CPS is chosen by top tier companies and government agencies for critical applications:
If you are looking for a credible alternative to solutions offered by Microsoft, Documentum or OpenText, you definitely want to have a look at CPS. That is to say, if you prefer to focus on adapting the software to your business rather than paying licenses...
CPS can deliver at least the same features as a major proprietary solution with more flexibility and a lower price (which won‘t be based on users licenses). This allows organizations to really control the cost of their ECM platform and maximize the ROI of the solution.
Maybe it‘s time to adapt softwares to your needs rather than adapting your needs to them (and it‘s definitely easier and more economically efficient to do so using an open source software than proprietary software).
The CPS development team is planning a lot of technical and functional improvements, all based on fully open-standards. Our goal is to implement new open standards to leverage existing technologies and tools. For example, we are working on XForms support in CPS to easily share forms between web applications and rich client applications (based on Eclipse RCP).
The main improvement we have been planning for the upcoming CPS development cycle (after 3.4) are :
