Is your website a caged tiger?

Many organisations seeking the ability to update their own websites opted for a proprietary content management system ?CMS?. Most of these were offered by local web developers using the .Net operating system.

Clients felt ?locked in? to their CMS provider obliged to sign software licensing agreements which often muddled website ownership. Add this to a business model where CMS developers sought to increase fees from existing clients as the new client market diminished and you have a recipe for disgruntled clients.

Demand for cost effective alternatives funded rapid growth of open source development world wide. In the last two years open source growth has been stunning. Tens of thousands of very creative developers and skilled programmers compete to build better applications and extensions in a collaborative, highly organised, peer reviewed business environment.

There's no more reason to hesitate

Much open source software is available for free and add-ons are inexpensive. When custom programming or special support is required there is an active, highly skilled, competitively priced free lance community available. Making CMS tools more powerful, more secure and easier to use dominate innovation in the open source space. Check out some recent 'before and after' examples >>

Bottom line if your organisation is spending less than $500,000 per annum on its web initiatives you need to understand what you can accomplish with open source software.

Net Impact has been advising our companies on web technology for several years. Jennifer manages to stay on top of new developments and has an uncanny ability to sort the wheat from the chaff. A couple of years ago Net Impact recommended we move our websites to an open source platform. This year, after we finally made the move, we regretted we had not acted much earlier.?

Wayne Cochrane