Using Open Source to realise business opportunities

The IT Industry is Undergoing a Major Paradigm Shift.

Open Source software is forcing the industry to stand up and take notice of the dramatic move from the realm of proprietary solutions towards collaborative- and services-based ecosystems proving to be a superior approach to their closed counterparts.

Hailed by IDC Research as "the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s", Open Source development principles harness the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. Open Source models best meet today's and tomorrow's IT challenges by providing better quality and more flexible solutions with higher reliability, lower cost, and significantly reduced risk of vendor lock-in.

Advantages of using Open Source include:

• Faster time to market by providing a large number of highly performant, interoperable components that can be easily assembled to meet the most complex market needs
• Efficient software acquisition process as products can be tested thoroughly before committing to a specific technology, moving acquisition to the point of value generation
• Reduced vendor lock-in guarantees long-term IT investments by strict adherence to industry standards, widespread availability of compatible technologies and support sources, and full access to source code
• Dramatically lower total cost of ownership by saving

Understanding, controlling, and leveraging Open Source is paramount as it becomes a pervasive component in IT architectures.

Sourcesense is a European consultancy and systems integrator with offices in UK, Netherlands and Italy with a focus on Open Source Governance across 4 domains: Enterprise and Web Content Management, Enterprise Search, Business Intelligence and Application Lifecycle Management.

Thanks to its unique positioning at the intersection of Enterprise and Communities - the latter not only by employing as many Open Source contributors as possible from Apache members to top JBoss Community contributors but also by actively contributing to the ecosystem - Sourcesense is typically brought in when the need for Interoperability and Open Standard is paramount.

Our direct experience shows that no matter what industry and what country you operate in, huge benefits are there for the taking:

UK: Tate Britain - Beyond The Fifth Gallery

Tate Online is widely recognised as one of the best museum websites in the world. This reputation is enhanced by the extensive and deep content that has been produced and published online over the past eight to ten years. However, Tate Online no longer view the website solely as a channel for publishing Tate content; they see it as an interactive platform for engaging with audiences.

To realise its ambitions a complete overhaul of Tate Online was recognised as essential, not only to make it the most engaging social arts website - the Fifth Gallery - but also to make it a dimension of everything Tate does, from research and conservation to fundraising and public programmes.

Following a thorough tender process Sourcesense and Wyona's Yanel were selected to be implemented as Tate Online's Open Source CMS.

"Since the needs of the gallery's website are so complex, it was clear that whichever CMS we chose would require substantial customisation, so we opted to work with Sourcesense and Wyona to undertake these developments, enabling us to quickly build a skilled team to work alongside the Tate team on the new website."

John Stack, Head of Tate Online

Italy: New Mission for SOSE

For 10 years SOSE: The Society for the Study of Industry, has collated information from over 4 million businesses in Italy to establish and implement industry studies. This wealth of information now has the potential to aid the growth of the Italian economy.

In combination with the databases of the the Ministry of Economy and the University of Industry SOSE was charged with the goal of providing access to this unique body of data and in supporting and partnering the business world with statistical and economic expertise and developing tailored research and analysis projects.

With their deep understanding of Enterprise Content Management and active participation in the Open Source Community Sourcesense were the natural choice for consultancy and were engaged to migrate from an Oracle based Portal to develop a completely Open Source Portal sose.it. The platform Sourcesense implemented is based on JBoss Portal and Alfresco ECM, with Lucene, OpenLDAP and the Apache webserver.

The site had complex requirements including: User profiling and registration, workflow approval, content upload and approval, a full featured forum with a faceted search feature, newsletter, RSS feeds, a non-registered user search feature and a fully gated research area.

Early feedback from SOSE and its new users is very positive and SOSE is on track to deliver on its goals of a range of products and services to support Italian business.

Netherlands: Rijkshuisstijl for Rijksoverheid

When the Dutch government decided to publish all public information through a single portal, Rijksoverheid.nl, Sourcesense was engaged to coordinate a solution that would migrate 14 ministry websites using a variety of platforms and systems to a common platform - Hippo CMS. Working to migrate the existing content to one central repository, the new site clearly meets the new web guidelines set by the Dutch government.

Drawing on their deep understanding and experience of Open Source and Open Standards, and extensive knowledge of Hippo CMS Sourcesense delivered an Agile project using Scrum methodology delivering two-week iterations allowing the client to identify priorities and direct the development from a working model.

The portal now provides a standard for all government departments to deliver a working Hippo CMS environment with reusable examples of customisation. Sourcesense and Hippo provided many 'Out of the Box' features including: search, news, dynamic menu navigation and standard document structure whilst allowing for the developing needs of a large public authority.

As with all Hippo projects the source code is freely available and having created a community Sourcesense and Hippo invite the stakeholders and citizens of Rijksoverheid to contribute and in turn benefit from shared knowledge, experience and improved communication.