Open Source Extends To PortalsOpen Source Extends To Portals

Open-source software has become an equalizer for small companies and departments within larger companies and organizations, providing inexpensive access to tools that can increase productivity. In some cases, open-source software complements more established software packages. In others, open source competes head on.

Metadot Portal Server manages to cover both categories. As an open-source tool for quickly building Web sites and portals, it can serve as a complementary technology to products from Plumtree Software Inc. or Vignette Corp. But, in a classic example of open source versus Microsoft, Metadot also plays in the same space as SharePoint Portal Server.

Companies or departments with as many as 3,000 employees can use Metadot as their primary intranet or Web-site tool, says Daniel Guermeur, president and founder of Metadot Corp. Guermeur in 2000 launched Metadot, governed by the General Public License, as an open-source project on SourceForge.net. Within a year, and with backing from his former employer, Schlumberger Ltd., Guermeur launched a software company based on selling services around the open-source portal tool.

Many companies and government agencies will use Plumtree or Vignette software to build their main portal sites, while seeking a more-lightweight, less-expensive tool to run departmental portals, Guermeur says, adding, "Very often, people want a small, collaborative site they can manage themselves."

Demand will only increase for open-source alternatives to many of the software products that companies buy today, Guermeur says. Advantages of open source include the collaborative nature of development and a lack of product-licensing costs. In the case of Metadot, contributors to the underlying open-source project regularly submit new features, called gizmos, that let Metadot users add discussions, polls, files, surveys, and calendars to their intranet pages.

Although open source will ultimately be an alternative to 80% of the software that companies buy and use, not every application can or should be open source, Guermeur says. "I'm not sure if OpenOffice is a great alternative to Word," he adds. "It's not sexy digging into word-processing code to add new features. It's better to delve into Web code, such as a browser application, where programmers can submit new plug-ins."

Organic Valley Family of Farms, the largest organic farmer cooperative in the United States, has since late 2003 been using Metadot to build and manage about a dozen intranet sites. IT director George Neill chose the application because it was easy to implement, included all of the features he was looking for, and required little effort to get management buy-in. When dealing with Organic Valley's business managers, Neill looks to connect on what he calls the "five F's": function, fit, future, financing, and feeling. "When we go through those areas and discuss things in that order, we generally all come out with the same conclusion," he says.

Neill found Metadot much the same way he found Organic Valley's first intranet package four years ago: by doing a Google search, which took him to SourceForge. That original package, phpWebSite, was a good place to start, allowing different users within Organic Valley's accounting, human-resources, and other departments to post information and access calendar software.

More recently, Neill began looking for some way to set up different access controls for different intranet users. He found those capabilities with Metadot, although he did check out Plumtree and Vignette first. "Our needs were met in Metadot, and I didn't have to pay $50,000 or $100,000 that I didn't have," he says. Neill and his 14-member IT staff are using Metadot to build an extranet site that can be accessed by the cooperative's farmers.