Confluence means "a coming together" and has been helping workers do just that since 2004. Starting out as an enterprise wiki, it has evolved through the years into an all-round collaboration tool. Confluence is available as a SaaS or hosted product, powered by Java. It is the Atlassian product and it is designed to work with other Atlassian products.
Confluence has the widest spread application of Atlassian's products, it could be applied in almost any environment. It is free to open source institutions and non-profits. Pricing starts at just a charity donation of US$ 10 for hosted smaller installations for less than 10 users.
In my post about open source content management systems (CMS), I mentioned that Alfresco, Drupal, Joomla, Apache Jackrabbit, Liferay are just few of the open source CMS. In this post, I will describe Alfresco which is very popular CMS.
Alfresco is an enterprise content management system for Microsoft Windows and Unix like operating systems. There are two types of Alfresco: Alfresco Community Edition and Alfresco Enterprise Edition. Alfresco Community Edition is free software. Alfresco Enterprise Edition is commercially and proprietary licensed open source for an enterprise. Its design is geared towards users who require a high degree of modularity and scalable performance.
It includes a content repository, an out-of-the-box web portal framework for managing and using standard portal content, a CIFS interface that provides file system compatibility on Microsoft Windows and Unix like operating systems, a web content management system capable of virtualizing webapps and static sites via Apache Tomcat, Lucene indexing, and Activiti workflow. The Alfresco modular architecture is developed using Java technology.
Drupal is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) and content management framework (CMF) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites. It is also used for content management and business collaboration.
he standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to content management systems. These include user account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS-feeds, page layout customization, and system administration. The Drupal core installation can be used as a brochureware website, a single- or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated content.
Joomla is a free and open source content management framework (CMF) for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets. It includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization.
Over 9,200 free and commercial extensions are available from the official Joomla! Extension Directory, and more are available from other sources. It is estimated to be the second most used CMS on the Internet after WordPress. Joomla won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in 2006, 2007, and 2011.
You can think of a Joomla! website as bringing together three elements:
your content, which is mainly stored in a database;
your template, which controls the design and presentation of your content (such as fonts, colors and layout);
Joomla! which is the software that bring the content and the template together to produce webpages.
Drupal is a quite powerful content management system (CMS) that is similar to competitors like WordPress and Joomla. It is typically installed on a web server, unlike WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) local programs like Adobe Dreamweaver (now part of Creative Cloud) and Microsoft FrontPage.
Drupal is an open source platform, meaning that publicly contributed extensions have been offered to extend functionality of the CMS. Part of the Drupal Core, taxonomy is integral to what web developers and programmers can or could do with the software. Taxonomy is a system of categorization, and Drupal can use taxonomy for a number of different purposes within its framework by using various techniques and tools available for the platform. Here, we will examine the basics of taxonomy in Drupal (what it means, how it’s used, etc.) and the various types of tasks that can be accomplished by taking advantage of taxonomy within the software.
The proliferation of information has made enterprise content management a necessity for most organizations. Managing the growing amounts of content generated throughout the normal course of daily operations requires flexible, rapidly deployed solutions that transform traditional content repositories and static intranets into dynamic, user friendly work environments. However, content management solutions from proprietary vendors could be expensive for some organizations. Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) could be a solution when budget is an obstacle in implementing enterprise content management initiative.
Open source ECM solutions have matured over the past several years, equaling the capabilities of proprietary software, and have been successfully deployed in major enterprises worldwide. They can support web content management, document management, records and email management, and collaboration. Today’s leading commercial open source ECM solutions feature all of the capabilities that proprietary applications offer - from rules-based content repositories to collaboration features combined with enterprise-grade scalability, reliability, and security.
