Open source CMS intranet

More than one-quarter of all organizations with an intranet use a CMS to power their intranet; most CMS solutions are commercial, brand name solutions.

Preliminary data from The Social Intranet Study (855 respondents) reveals that while portal solutions such as WebSphere and SharePoint (also called a “development platform”) power one-third of intranets, but pure breed CMS solutions are nearly as popular:

Social Intranet Study Tech Platforms June 15 2011
Social Intranet Study Tech Platforms June 15 2011

Note that custom built solutions, hard-coded HTML or PHP intranets are still commonplace with 21% of organizations having built their own intranet.

Open source solutions continue to gain popularity. Aside from SharePoint, open source solutions are the most popular social media technology solutions for powering intranet 2.0 applications, including MediaWiki and WordPress. Some organizations are using an open source CMS, which continue to gain market share, to power the main intranet itself.

Two of the top Open Source CMS solutions are Hippo (Java based) and Plone (based on Zope and Python). Hippo is a quickly emerging and a popular WCM solution; Plone has been around a few years more and is one of the most popular and used open source platforms on the planet (it also powers our corporate website: www.PrescientDigital.com). Both have portal like capabilities, social media applications or plug-ins, and rich content management functionality. But each also have weaknesses and are not appropriate solutions for all organizations.

These two intranet CMS alternatives will be compared, head-to-head, on the CMS Connected webinar in a lively and interactive 90-minute debate style format on June 15 at 12pm EST. CMS Connected plans to dig past the glossy brochures, web marketing videos and industry buzz-words and find out who and what’s really driving these two evenly matched open source WCM solutions.

During the 90-minute event, Hippo and Plone representatives will answer hard-nosed questions about their products and business strategies, allowing each vendor an opportunity to provide an honest answer. The attending audience will also have the opportunity to ask a few ‘no holds barred’ questions of their own.

Also read:

Content management proves costly without planning
Pssst, wanna buy a CMS?
View the video replay of the last CMS Connected webinar

12 thoughts on “Open source CMS intranet”

  1. Pingback: 5 intranet trends for 2011 and beyond | J. Boye

  2. Pingback: 5 intranet trends for 2011 and beyond | J. Boye

  3. Pingback: C’ГЁ vita oltre Sharepoint? Si! | Intranet Management

  4. Pingback: C’ГЁ vita oltre Sharepoint? Si! | Intranet Management

  5. If you are planning to deploy an Intranet, check out SharePoint implementeds product. It basically runs on SharePoint Foundation ( free version ) so you dont have any licensing costs but yet get all the power of sharepoint and can always upgrade later to a pid version.

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  7. Mr. Ward, in the Summary Report of the Intranet 2.0 Global Study 2010, you write the following:

    “More than three-quarters (77%) of organizations are now using a CMS for their intranet (compared to 63% in September 2009):
    -34% use an off-the-shelf solution CMS
    -16% use a portal solution
    -14% use a custom built CMS (home grown CMS)
    -13% use a hybrid/combination
    -10% use open source (no change)”

    How does this correspond with the information in this article where you say “More than one-quarter of all organizations with an intranet use a CMS to power their intranet”
    I’m doing some desk research to be able to write about CMS usage for intranet systems and i am kind of confused now.

    1. Well for starters, you’re using data from two different years. This year’s Social Intranet Study 2011 reveals:

       34 percent of intranets use a portal solution.
       27 percent use a content management system.
       20 percent use a custom-built solution.
       14 percent use a hybrid solution.
       4 percent use a social media platform.

      The data from last year’s study, 2010, was a little different, as was the question.

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  10. Interesting article. In my opinion, open source software solutions grow in popularity even if they are still considered by some as ‘false economy’ solutions. I’m currently working at TALCOD (French Open source and Web agency), and all the customers seem satisfied with the solutions and Intranets that we base on Drupal. I do believe that open source solutions have a bright future.

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