A Boston based energy Cooperative , Sierra Southwest has has found an open source content management system (CMS) that gives it the power needed to run not only the company intranet, but a handful of external-facing Web sites as well.

The open source content management system is Metadot Portal Server. Metadot Portal Server provides a very large number of content management and collaboration functionalities in modules called gizmos (portlets) that are available out of the box such as:

• Discussion Forum
• File and Content Management
• Task / To-Do List
• Calendar
• Poll
• FAQs
• User Personal Website
• Group and user-based access control
• My News Page - like My Yahoo
• Email Notifications
• URL management
• Rich text Editor (from interactivetools.com)
• Site themes and templates

Using Metadot Portal Server, the cooperative is saving thousands of dollars on licensing fees it would otherwise have had to pay if it made use of proprietary CMS software.

Tony Cardenas, Sierra's security administrator, says, "I ran across Metadot and implemented it on a trial basis." Cardenas moved one Web site over to Metadot's Portal Server and found that it took only a few hours to set it up. The same was true for the installation process with Metadot's intranet software. He also appreciates the thoroughness of Metadot's documentation. "The instructions for the Linux platform were straightforward and easy to follow. We had it up in a couple of hours." Cardenas was running the company intranet on Windows before the migration to Metadot. Now all the company's internal and external sites are running on SUSE 8. Cardenas is in the process of training several selected staff members to use the Metadot backend.

The company uses its intranet to facilitate communication of important information to employees, he needed a system that would allow him to quickly upload content without having to hand-convert everything to HTML. Additionally, it had to be simple enough that non-technical staff could learn how to update their own departments' content so that Cardenas could concentrate on more important IT tasks.

Source : IT Managers JournalPrashanth Rai