After the iBusiness Executive Summary 11-12/2005 of the Hightext publishing house, an open source CMS is not suitable for each project. The software manufacturers like NOEO OHG as well as their competition like RedDot and Imperia and leading integration agencies like Target-E are of the opinion that open source management systems will in no way displace commercial software. Many of the offered solutions such as the NOEO Content Management Systems can be strongly tailored to the branches and offer excellent interfaces to other business software – advantages which systems like Type3 currently can only offer at great expenses.
In the edition of the iBusiness Executive Summary, it becomes clear that a commercial CMS often is even cheaper. With complex portals, extranets and intranets which are bound to a commercial IT environment, open source systems show clear weak points according to surveys. Directly in the point of integration, license-free systems are often a cost trap according to Michael Praetorius, partner at NOEO OHG:
“With our NOEO Alliance partners we have found out that integrations with NOEO can be realized much quicker than with Typo3. Speaking in costs, that is an absolutely strong argument against open source. The integration costs should be properly proportioned with the licensing price. Finally with open source only a displacement of the costs takes place. OS thus means everything but free. In many open source installations, it is however not the price which is decisive but rather the desire of the developer and the integration agents to be able to develop the project at any time themselves. Exactly this wish is complied to with NOEO. In addition, the developers and customers can count on our support and have a guarantee which open source cannot give them. With projects with a budget frame up to 8000 Euros, many projects are first implemented internally – partially with open source. If the responsible technical employee finds a new job after a certain time, the knowledge thus leaves the company and then there are problems with time and new costs which do not result with a commercial partner who is committed to document and gives a guarantee.“
Other manufacturers also argument with the unclarified liability situation with free software installations since agents only can give a guarantee for their integration work but not for bugs which for example occur in freely accessible software.
An important strategy of the manufacturer is to make their own products exactly as easily accessible to the customers such as is the case with open source software. In addition, the CMS manufacturers should in no way forget the marketing according to the assessment from the Hightext Verlag publishing house. The greatest danger is that the commercial CMS cannot keep up with the name recognition of the license-free systems, Michael Praetorius also believes. Because open source CMS such as Typo3 have received an enormous amount of word-of-mouth advertising in the previous years. The open exchange with the developers and customers was decisive:
”Most CMS providers hide their products instead of simply giving them to the developers and customers for testing,” according to Michael Praetorius. "The fear of illegal installations or the eye of the competition is often greater.” In doing so, customer service suffers with which the CMS manufacturers can show the customers that commercial products in many cases are better than open source systems."
Michael Praetorius has also had good experiences with offering the developers open interfaces: ,”Only the core of NOEO is encoded. Since NOEO itself also uses open source and is programmed in PHP, a perfect interface exists to this script language on which the developers can dock onto their own applications. The dialogue with the developers is the most important. That is those who in cases of doubt decide for a Typo3 or similar since they know this program. What is important is to make clear to the customers, partners and the developers that open source stands for flexibility but not necessarily for free or cheaper! Commercial CMS systems can also supply flexibility like OS variations. The object and template editors, open interfaces, those are all tools which a CMS can even make more transparent than most open source alternatives. In addition, the manufacturers of CMS systems should bind together more in order to work on common standards!”
