Here’s an excerpt from an interesting article from University Business Magazine about colleges and universities having to choose between open source versus commercial products, esp. in the United States. Larry Bouthillier of Harvard Business School is cited:
Open source is also widely popular in U.S. higher education, but IHE technology professionals are choosy about where they use it. They tend to employ it in smaller bits of programming (or in the tools programmers use to create and modify their programs) rather than in large, complex, mission-critical programs, say tech leaders….
The system is now about 50 percent commercial product, and 50 percent home-grown, according to Bouthillier. HBS also recently implemented a Wiki solution, to which users across campus can add information.
Open-source options that used the script language PHP (see glossary, p. 66) simply didn’t work well with the rest of the business school’s system. So officials chose Confluence Wiki software from Atlassian Software Systems. “We looked at all the open-source stuff and at the commercial stuff, and we ended up going with the commercial product because it was the one that would allow us to integrate into the rest of our system,” says Bouthillier.
Read the complete article: CMS: Sticking with the Tried & True.
