Open Source Blog

With such a large number of sites to support and the prospect of more in the future, JBoss.org leader Mark Newton was encountering a challenge common to many larger organisations: he said it needed one single, scalable web infrastructure with the flexibility to allow project teams to run their own affairs and develop sites suited to their own individual needs and identities.

“It is important that our project teams are not restrained by the CMS and that they have free reign to exercise their own individuality and control of their own web space,” said Newton. “At the same time we want a solution that is simple to use and easy to extend. Magnolia is the perfect solution. Each project has complete control over the look and feel of their site and can even choose to use their own domain in place of jboss.org if they wish to maintain their own identity. Having the ability to do this but still have all the projects run on the same back-end system is critical for our requirements.”

“We need a reliable Open Source alternative from a partner we can trust, and it is vital that they offer a commercial support package,” said Newton. “Magnolia simply fits all of our requirements.”

He also pointed to the need for an intuitive interface, to minimise the management burden and the need for training: “Everything can be done remotely,” Newton said. “Users with the correct permissions simply login to their site, navigate to the page they wish to edit and select the right section, before being offered a set of logical choices to add, remove or edit the content. Likewise, administration can also be carried out remotely using a browser.”

Magnolia, as you’d expect, was fairly chuffed with the deal. “For Magnolia, this is a massive vote of confidence in our technology from one of the most highly qualified judges out there,” said Boris Kraft, CTO at Magnolia. “As a part of Red Hat and with their own large community, JBoss.org has access to a wealth of Open Source expertise. Their decision to use Magnolia, given the organisation’s insight into all areas of Open Source Software, is one of the highest implicit recommendations we could hope for.”

There is a video interview with JBoss.org's Newton on Magnolia's site which is here.

I’ve blogged in the past about a few other open source content management players: Sense/Net from Hungary; the French firm Nuxeo; and Alfresco, which claims to have unique Microsoft SharePoint compatibility. An interesting aside is that Alfresco was founded by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum (a commercial content management player bought by EMC) and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects.