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Why marketers should love the open source community |
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A client with a small budget approached us because they needed a custom portal and learning community to support its 60-member VAR network. At first, the plan and budget did not appear very realistic: build a portal with content management, membership management, document management, and collaboration for less than $5500, including licenses, graphic design, labor and customization.
Other application project design goals were:
- Affordable software components
- Simple installation, configuration and training
- Standardized components and not dependent on a specific browser
- Admin/mgmnt, content creation and workflow control must be browser-based
- No dependencies on a single vendor
- Ability to host the application with an ISP
- No dependencies on an application service provider.
Obviously, off-the-shelf commercial portal software was not feasible.
Our solution was to use open source software. Within 30 days, the project went from a blank sheet of paper to a fully deployed VAR portal. The portal we delivered ended up saving our client thousands of dollars.
HOW WE DID IT
A brief conversation with our ISP, XNET (www.xnet.com), revealed that it could support the project in the timeframe our client required.
Next, our developers evaluated a number of open-source Content Management Platforms such as Joomla, PostNuke and PHPNuke. They selected Joomla for the size of the developer community and the availability of a number of critical add-on applications.
The final step was a simple installation and customization of graphics. All told, a prototype of the VAR intranet was operational in five days and a final portal was launched in 30 days.
For the client, the VAR portal and its underlying design features have already produced important strategic results -- namely by providing the entire VAR network with a single point from which they can find important documents, share expertise and schedule webinars and other events.
Specific project advantages realized by the portal are:
- Reduced Development Cost: The tools were free, and this kept costs low
- Reduced Per-Seat Fees: There were no per-seat fees. This allowed us to justify important additional hours for content development
- Reduced Computer Hardware Cost: These tools are resource efficient, hosting was inexpensive
- No purchase approvals: Since we didn't need to buy anything, it made it easier to get started.
In the end, it is our opinion that open source tools make sense for some of our future projects. When budgets are tight, or when you'd rather spend dollars on great content instead of programming, open source tools reduce development costs and usually eliminate recurring costs as well as reduce product development cycles. |
