A FEATURE-BASED ANALYSIS OF OPEN SOURCE TOOLS
FOR ENTERPRISE 2.0
Open Source Tools for Team Collaboration in SMEs
Bettina Schauer, Michael Zeiller and Robert Matzinger
Information Technology and Information Studies, University of Applied Sciences Burgenland
Campus 1, Eisenstadt, Austria
Keywords: Enterprise 2.0, Electronic collaboration, Knowledge sharing, Open source, Collaboration systems, Social
software.
Abstract: The marketplace of Enterprise 2.0 tools that support knowledge workers within companies to work together
on cognitive tasks and share information and knowledge is diversified and offers commercial systems of
varying complexity and functional range as well as open source software. Like commercial systems, open
source tools for Enterprise 2.0 provide a broad range of functionality and offer a good alternative for
organisations – especially for SMEs. This paper presents a study of the growing market for Enterprise 2.0
systems and focuses entirely on ones that are available under an open source license. We introduce a set of
97 individual features and criteria to assess a representative sample of open source Enterprise 2.0 tools. Our
results show that the marketplace of open source tools for Enterprise 2.0 offers technically mature solutions
with a broad range of functionality.
1 INTRODUCTION
Enterprise 2.0, the use of emergent social software
platforms within companies, or between companies
and their partners and customers, has rapidly gained
momentum since this term was coined by McAfee in
2006 (McAfee, 2006a). Although Enterprise 2.0
incorporates more aspects than simply applying
social software or comprehensive Enterprise 2.0
software systems, the software tools supporting
collaboration processes have a great impact on the
utilisation of Enterprise 2.0 concepts in enterprises
and organisations (Cook, 2008). A lot of vendors –
big, well-known market actors as well as small
startup companies – offer numerous tools and
systems. In addition market analysts, journals and
online communities provide market reports and
analyses to support potential customers to identify
the appropriate Enterprise 2.0 system.
The basic concept of Enterprise 2.0 can be
applied to all kinds and sizes of organisations. Small
and medium size enterprises (SME) use social
software platforms just like large enterprises for
sharing information and knowledge among their
employees. They need maximum but specific
functionality and community support at a reasonable
price and workload. Besides small vendors, niche
players and big software companies that offer highly
flexible but complex and sometimes costly
commercial platforms, there are also several Free
and Open Source software tools available. Open
source Enterprise 2.0 tools (Spath et al., 2007) often
provide a good alternative solution especially for
SMEs and not-for-profit organisations to support
team collaboration in a cost-effective way.
Market reports on Enterprise 2.0 by market
analysts typically target large enterprises and
therefore rarely cover open source tools (Drakos et
al., 2010); (Koplowitz, 2009). Individual reports on
specific open source tools often appear in journals
and in several channels within the social software,
Enterprise 2.0 or open source community. However,
substantiated analyses and comparisons of open
source tools can hardly be found. In this paper we
present a market analysis of the growing market of
Enterprise 2.0 systems that focuses entirely on those
that are available under an open source license.
These Enterprise 2.0 systems have to support and
enable communication, coordination, collaboration
and connection (Riemer, 2007) and (Cook, 2008).
Consequently, only those open source tools that
support – at least partially – these four primary
57
Schauer B., Zeiller M. and Matzinger R..
A FEATURE-BASED ANALYSIS OF OPEN SOURCE TOOLS FOR ENTERPRISE 2.0 - Open Source Tools for Team Collaboration in SMEs.
DOI: 10.5220/0003638400570066
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2011), pages 57-66
ISBN: 978-989-8425-81-2
Copyright
c
2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
interaction processes of enterprise collaboration are
included in our study. We introduce features and
criteria that can be applied to assess Enterprise 2.0
systems and present detailed results for five selected
open source Enterprise 2.0 systems.
In Section 2 we discuss Enterprise 2.0 and team
collaboration and present related work on open
source Enterprise 2.0 systems. Section 3 identifies
and characterises Enterprise 2.0 software and
analyses the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace. Section 4
presents the applied assessment methodology.
Section 5 provides detailed results of a number of
open source Enterprise 2.0 systems. In section 6, we
summarise key findings on open source systems for
team collaboration based on the sample of evaluated
Enterprise 2.0 systems. Finally, Section 7 concludes
this paper.
2 ENTERPRISE 2.0
McAfee first introduced the term Enterprise 2.0 in
his trend-setting paper “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of
Emergent Collaboration” where he discusses how
companies can benefit from Web 2.0 technologies to
support knowledge workers (McAfee, 2006a).
McAfee (2006b) defines Enterprise 2.0 as “... the
use of emergent social software platforms within
companies, or between companies and their partners
or customers”. The utilisation of social media within
enterprises and organisations has significantly
increased since then. For example, weblogs may be
used as project logs or to communicate between the
CEO or head of marketing and the company’s
customers. Knowledge workers of organisations
create shared knowledge bases with the help of
wikis. Microblogging applications allow for easy
communication among team members. Thus, social
media help employees and team members to work
together on cognitive tasks and share information
and knowledge.
2.1 Enterprise 2.0 Systems
All definitions of the term Enterprise 2.0 have in
common that they refer to the use of social software
or other web-based technologies to support
enterprises and organisations. For example the
AIIM, the Association for Information and Image
Management (also known as the enterprise content
management association) defines Enterprise 2.0 as a
system of web-based technologies that provide rapid
and agile collaboration, information sharing,
emergence and integration capabilities in the
extended enterprise (AIIM, n.d.).
Software to support communication, cooperation
and collaboration within teams of (knowledge)
workers has been used for decades under the terms
Groupware, Group Support Systems and Computer
Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) (Koch,
2008); (Koch and Gross, 2006). Ellis et al. (1991)
define groupware as “computer-based systems that
support groups of people engaged in a common task
(goal) and that provide an interface to a shared
environment”.
One of the basic functionalities of Enterprise 2.0
systems is the support of electronic collaboration
(short: E-Collaboration) among team members. E-
Collaboration systems, i.e. information systems to
support collaborative work, are “software for
supporting communication, coordination and
cooperation between people processes in groups”
(Riemer, 2007). Therefore software and tools to
support the ideas and concepts of Enterprise 2.0 can
be found as Enterprise 2.0 software, groupware,
CSCW systems and E-Collaboration systems.
To describe the characteristics of Enterprise 2.0
systems, McAfee (2006a) uses the acronym
SLATES, which indicates six key components of
Enterprise 2.0 technologies: Search – Links –
Authoring – Tags – Extensions – Signals.
Hinchcliffe (2007) extends SLATES by four
elements: Freeform – Social – Network-oriented –
Emergent (resulting in the mnemonic
FLATNESSES). While many authors (e.g., Koch,
2008; Ellis et al., 1991) categorise groupware and
CSCW according to three basic interaction modes –
communication, coordination, cooperation – Cook
(2008) modifies and extends this approach to four
primary functions of social software and Enterprise
2.0: communication – cooperation – collaboration –
connection (4Cs). We will follow this approach
based on 4Cs to organise our feature-oriented
analysis of Enterprise 2.0 systems.
2.2 Related Work
The market of Enterprise 2.0 tools and E-
Collaboration systems offers a large variety of
features and configurations. Riemer (2007) presents
a study which structures the range of available
systems into system classes using cluster analysis.
He applies the classification process to a sample of
94 systems that are used to derive four main system
classes. Xu et al. (2008) present a survey on
asynchronous collaboration tools, i.e., systems with
limited functionality. Büchner et al. (2009) analyse
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58
seven commercial and open source Enterprise 2.0
tools based on 51 core Enterprise 2.0 services (in 13
service categories) to examine which concepts and
services are supported by these tools. Comparative
studies, which analyse open source tools
exclusively, can hardly be found (Spath et al., 2007).
Market analysts like Gartner Research (Drakos et
al., 2010), Forrester Research (Koplowitz, 2009) or
Real Story Group (2010) tend to cover the entire
market for collaboration platforms and social
software vendors. However, they focus on vendors
with strong market presence and diverse
functionality. Consequently, small niche players and
open source tools (e.g., Koplowitz, 2009 includes
one open source tool [MindTouch] in his analysis of
eleven vendors) are rarely included. These market
reports, for example evaluate the ability to execute
and the completeness of vision to identify niche
players, visionaries, challengers and leaders (Drakos
et al., 2010). Functionality and features of Enterprise
2.0 tools are represented in these studies only to a
subordinate extent.
3 E-COLLABORATION
SYSTEMS
This paper discusses Enterprise 2.0 software that
supports collaboration among team members. Thus
we focus on those software tools that are commonly
denoted as E-Collaboration systems and tools that
cover the same functional range. From the large
variety of available systems, we narrow our analysis
to those systems available under an open source
license (OSS).
Refining and enhancing Riemer's definition
(Riemer, 2007), we define E-Collaboration systems
as software for supporting and enabling
communication, coordination and collaboration
between people in shared projects, processes and
teams within organisations and for cross-
organisational use. According to Cook’s 4Cs model
(Cook, 2008), comprehensive E-Collaboration
systems should cover all types of social interaction
in collaborative team processes – communication,
coordination, collaboration and connection.
3.1 E-Collaboration Marketplace
The Enterprise 2.0 and E-Collaboration systems
marketplace is highly dynamic and diverse and
consists of heterogeneous system classes. It is made
up of various tools with different levels of support of
Enterprise 2.0 features. In his map of the 2009
Enterprise 2.0 marketplace, Hinchliffe (2009)
arranges more than 70 major products along two
dimensions Enterprise Capability and Support for
Core Enterprise 2.0 Features. He clusters them into
three categories: Established Software Firms &
Incumbent Players Territory – Enterprise 2.0 Sweet
Spot – Open Source, Startup, Web Co. Territory.
An evaluation report on enterprise collaboration
software by the Real Story Group (2010) analyses
Functional Business Services and Technology
Services (application services, administrative &
system services), Vendor Intangibles and Universal
Scenarios for 27 products. These products are
organised into six categories: platform vendors (4),
social software suites (7), wikis (5), blogs (3), white-
label community services (4) and public networks
(4).
Market analysts like Gartner Research or
Forrester Research typically analyse in their reports
only vendors with significant market presence.
Koplowitz (2009) discusses the collaboration
platform products of 11 vendors and organises them
into three categories: leaders, strong performers,
contenders. In the 2010 version of their Magic
Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace
Gartner discusses 23 vendors after assessing their
market presence and the functional capabilities of
the products (Drakos et al., 2010). Based on their
evaluation criteria concerning Ability to Execute (7
criteria) and Completeness of Vision (8 criteria) they
identify three leaders, two challengers, seven
visionaries and eleven niche players.
Besides these major reports, listings on
Enterprise 2.0, E-Collaboration systems and
groupware can be found in (online) journals, in
Wikipedia and in various Enterprise 2.0 and open
source communities.
3.2 OSS Tools for Team Collaboration
A large variety of open source tools for team
cooperation and collaboration exists which are
referred to as groupware or E-Collaboration systems.
According to our definition of E-Collaboration
systems, only those tools will be part of a detailed
analysis that support all four basic types of social
interaction (full support or partial support per
interaction process, but all types have to be
supported). Applying this limitation, we eliminate
the vast number of single function open source tools,
e.g. all those wikis, weblogs, chats, video
conferencing tools, project management tools,
content management tools, tagging or bookmarking
solutions, etc., that offer only a limited number of
A FEATURE-BASED ANALYSIS OF OPEN SOURCE TOOLS FOR ENTERPRISE 2.0 - Open Source Tools for Team
Collaboration in SMEs
59
features according to their system class, but do not
cover the entire spectrum of functions for team
collaboration.
Based on a detailed market analysis in which we
analysed the functional range, we set up a longlist of
15 open source tools to be included in our study:
Alfresco Share
dotProject
EGroupware
IGSuite
Liferay Portal / Social Office
MindTouch Core
more.groupware
Novell Open Workgroup Suite
NullLogic Groupware
OpenGroupware
phpGroupWare
PHProjekt
Simple Groupware
TUTOS
Zimbra Collaboration Suite
Other open source tools that are often labelled as
groupware, too – like Kolab, netOffice, Web Collab,
Plone or Scalix – have not been included because of
their focus on project or content management or
simply because their scope of operation does not
meet our requirements for E-Collaboration systems.
Due to reasons of presentation in consequence of
lack of space in this paper we had to reduce the
longlist to a shortlist containing only five E-
Collaboration systems:
Alfresco Share, Community v3.4.0
EGroupware, v1.4
Liferay Portal, Community Edition v6.0.5 CE
Simple Groupware, v0.701
TUTOS, v1.7
These products have been chosen to represent the
major types of collaboration tools on the market
including tools focusing on content-based
collaboration (Alfresco Share), content sharing
(Simple Groupware), and project management (i.e.,
focus on coordination; TUTOS) as well as
connection-oriented tools (Liferay), and groupware
style tools (EGroupware). Thus, these five tools
fairly represent collaboration solutions on the open
source marketplace. Despite this limitation to a
representative number of Enterprise 2.0 systems, the
presented feature list and evaluation criteria can be
easily applied to all tools in the longlist and to new
emerging tools.
4 EVALUATION
METHODOLOGY
The evaluation methodology used to assess the open
source E-Collaboration systems consists of the
following three steps (Author X, 2010 – identity of
authors removed due to requirements of "double-
blind" paper evaluation):
1. Selection of E-Collaboration systems
2. Definition of evaluation criteria
3. Assessment
The basis for all three steps of the evaluation are the
primary interaction processes for collaboration
defined by Riemer (2007) and Cook (2008). Tasks in
electronic collaboration can be assigned to one of
the following primary interaction processes, which
are also called the 4Cs (following Cook, 2008):
Communication
Coordination
Collaboration
Connection
In the first step of the evaluation process we select a
number of E-Collaboration systems for the
assessment (see Section 3.2). Due to space
limitations results will be presented in Section 5 for
members of the shortlist only.
The second step of the evaluation process covers
the definition of appropriate evaluation criteria.
Functionalities provided by E-Collaboration systems
were assigned to each of the categories, which
resulted in a feature list grouped into the 4Cs. In
addition, two more categories were identified to be
important for the evaluation of open source tools:
cross-sectional features as well as administration &
technology. These features were selected on the
basis of a detailed study of literature on electronic
collaboration, CSCW software and groupware (e.g.,
Riemer, 2007); (Ellis et al., 1991), of related reports
and studies such as Büchner et al. (2009), Spath et
al. (2007), Drakos et al. (2010) and Koplowitz
(2009) which were complemented by the results of a
number of interviews with experts (e.g., consultants)
in the field of CSCW and electronic collaboration
plus personal expertise of the authors. For a detailed
description of the respective features, refer to the
following sections.
For the assessment of the E-Collaboration
systems according to their strengths and weaknesses
with respect to the 4C categories, weightings were
assigned to the various features representing their
relative importance within each category. Since
related studies and market reports (e.g., Büchner et
KMIS 2011 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
60
al., 2009); (Spath et al., 2007) often do not provide
weightings, we based ours on the experiences of
experts (e.g. derived from interviews with
consultants) plus personal expertise of the authors
(see Section 5 for details of features and
weightings).
The evaluation was not undertaken for a specific
use case, but for a standard team collaboration
scenario. This scenario covers typical activities of a
team of collaborating knowledge workers, such as
creating knowledge by sharing and structuring ideas,
preserving knowledge by creating and editing
documents together, sharing knowledge by
providing central access to information for all team
members as well as coordinating collaboration
activities with the help of tasks. Of course, in the
case of applying the proposed method to a specific
use case, the weightings of all features have to be
adjusted correspondingly.
Due to the application of a standard team
collaboration scenario all categories were supposed
to be equally important. Thus, we do not compute an
overall sum of all features to get a single rating
number. Each system was evaluated according to
whether it offered a certain feature, which
subsequently increased the total score within each
category. The assessment resulted in a score for each
category with a maximum of 100% per category.
5 ENTERPRISE 2.0 OPEN
SOURCE TOOLS PROFILE
In the following subsections the features of the 4C
categories, the category cross-sectional features as
well as administration & technology, with a special
emphasis on features relevant for choosing an open
source system are presented. The tables show the
features, the assigned weightings for each feature
and scores for the analysed tools in the shortlist (see
Section 3.2). The five E-Collaboration systems got
the according score if the feature was supported (
)
or not (
).
5.1 Communication
This category covers tools for asynchronous and
synchronous communication as well as contact
management and social presence. Among the
asynchronous tools, the functionality of email with
connection to an external email server was
considered to be the most important as email is still
the most widely used means of communication. An
integrated and convenient solution for managing
contacts was also regarded as highly important.
Social presence features, which are often integrated
in instant messaging services, have gained more and
more significance for unified communication as they
allow users to choose the right means for contacting
other team members.
Table 1: Features of category communication.
Category
Communication
Weight Alfresco
Share
EGroup
ware
Liferay Simple
Group
ware
TUTOS
Total score 100,00 50,00 63,00 85,50 50,50 45,00
Asynchronous 50,00
Internal email 2,50
Email external email
server
17,50
Discussion forum 7,50
Weblog 10,00
Microblogging 2,50
News 5,00
Comments 5,00
Synchronous 15,00
Instant messaging 3,00
Broadcast 0,75
Desktop telephone
conference
0,75
Video conference 3,00
Web conference 2,25
Telephone (audio) 3,75
Video telephone 1,50
Contact
management
20,00
Social presence 15,00
In the category communication, Liferay supports
most of the important features. All systems support
email using external email servers. Social presence
showing the status of a team member as well as
his/her availability is supported by Alfresco,
EGroupware and Liferay, thus facilitating unified
communication.
5.2 Coordination
The category coordination comprises features for
task management, project management and
workflows as well as the coordination of
appointments and meetings. A group calendar
providing an overview of the appointments of all
team members was regarded as the most critical
feature for efficient and effective coordination,
followed by the management of tasks. Some systems
provide quite sophisticated functionalities for project
management, depending on whether the system was
designed to support project management or was
developed out of a project management tool and
combined with collaborative features. Simple
workflows are also supported by some E-
A FEATURE-BASED ANALYSIS OF OPEN SOURCE TOOLS FOR ENTERPRISE 2.0 - Open Source Tools for Team
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61
Collaboration systems. However, for the full
integration of workflows that also allows for
designing complex processes, additional software
packages are required in most cases.
Table 2: Features of category coordination.
Category
Coordination
Weight Alfresco
Share
EGroup
ware
Liferay Simple
Group
ware
TUTOS
Total score 100,00 53,50 92,50 48,00 52,50 67,50
Surveys 5,00
Workflow
management
10,00
Modelling of
workflows
2,50
Ad hoc workflows 6,00
Workflow templates 1,50
Project management 20,00
Gantt charts 5,00
Work package
coordination
4,00
Assign work packages
to employees
3,00
Status of work
packages
3,00
Resource mgmt. 4,00
Multi project mgmt. 1,00
Task management 25,00
Task coordination 10,00
Assign tasks to
employees
7,50
Status of tasks 7,50
Appointment
coordination
30,00
Group calendar 18,00
Personal calendar 4,50
Search for free dates 7,50
Meeting
coordination
10,00
Coordination of
participants
5,00
Coordination of
documents
5,00
In the category coordination, EGroupware gets
the highest score followed by TUTOS. EGroupware
provides a fully developed calendar and task
management system including features for software
development projects such as bug tracking, feature
requests and patches as well as timesheets and
resource management. EGroupware also supports
the management of multiple projects.
TUTOS also supports the management of
software development projects including Scrum,
invoice, risk management, bug tracking and the
administration of installations. Even though these
features are not really necessary for standard team
collaboration scenarios, the consequence of this
emphasis on project management are extensive
functionalities for coordination tasks.
5.3 Collaboration
Within the category collaboration, wikis are
regarded as a widely used, suitable and thus
important means of shared content production. A
fully developed administration of shared content is
crucial for a system to adequately support team
collaboration. Creating documents out of the shared
workspace proved to be a significant feature for E-
Collaboration systems to be integrated into daily
work routines. Workspaces supporting this
functionality have got a higher chance of being used
like the desktop. On the other hand, E-Collaboration
systems that provide only up and downloading of
documents risk being used as a repository for
documents instead of supporting active
collaboration.
Table 3: Features of category collaboration.
Category
Collaboration
Weight Alfresco
Share
EGroup
ware
Liferay Simple
Group
ware
TUTOS
Total score 100,00 70,25 58,25 75,50 68,00 18,50
Shared content
production
20,00
Wiki 10,00
Whiteboard 3,00
Synchronously
shared documents
4,00
Shared ideas /
brainstorming
3,00
Working together
on the same objects
15,00
Social tagging 6,75
Social bookmarking 6,00
Social cataloguing 2,25
Administration of
shared content
50,00
Document sharing 7,50
Image sharing 2,00
Video/audio sharing 2,00
Restricted access for
content
4,00
Restricted access for
folder
2,50
Check in/check out 5,00
Up- & download 5,00
Versioning 4,00
Archiving 2,50
Folder / shared
folder
7,50
Content tagging 4,00
Folder tagging 1,50
Personal site 2,50
Creating
documents out of
the shared
workspace
15,00
Text document 5,25
Spreadsheet 1,50
Presentation 1,50
Graphics 0,75
…using MS Office 6,00
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In the category collaboration, Liferay gets the
highest score followed by Alfresco and Simple
Groupware. While Liferay supports the collaborative
organisation of content and the according meta data
with the help of social tagging, bookmarking and
cataloguing, Alfresco´s strength is the administration
of shared content. Simple Groupware offers several
features for dealing with shared content and enables
editors to create (wiki) text, spreadsheets and
graphics in the workspace, but does not support
tagging.
5.4 Connection
The category connection provides the presentation
of the user profiles as well as social features.
Profiling allows users to present personal expertise
and people search supports finding the right person
to contact. E-Collaboration systems with an
emphasis on connection provide a short profile of
the author together with contact details for every
piece of content.
Table 4: Features of category connection.
Category
Connection
Weight Alfresco
Share
EGroup
ware
Liferay Simple
Group
ware
TUTOS
Total score 100,00 50,00 58,00 86,00 50,00 50,00
People search 25,0
People profiling 25,0
People tracking 8,00
Social networking 20,0
Visualisation of the
network
9,00
Network analysis 5,00
People tagging 8,00
Liferay´s emphasis is on the social connection of
team members. The system provides activity
tracking on blogs, message boards and wikis with a
Facebook-like activity wall. Furthermore the social
networking aspect is supported by the possibility to
view the friends of a team member as well as their
activities together with the team member´s profile.
All systems provide user profiles and the possibility
to search for people.
5.5 Cross-sectional Features
Cross-sectional features cover all functionalities that
do not only belong to a single category, but support
some or all of them. Among these features,
configurable areas for users were regarded as the
most important, as they allow for the designing of a
workspace that suits the specific requirements of the
team without the need for an administrator to
customise the workspace. Also the “pull” instead of
the “push” way of getting informed about news is
integrated into this category by the ability to get
newsfeeds and set alerts. The “pull” metaphor is one
of the essential elements when trying to cope with
the information overload that is mainly caused by
emails and to filter only relevant information.
Equally important for getting the right pieces of
information in time are complex search
functionalities, which incorporate various sources of
content and also people profiles. As knowledge
work becomes more and more flexible and location
independent, the synchronisation of the E-
Collaboration system with mobile devices is
regarded as an important aspect for today´s working
conditions.
Table 5: Features of category cross-sectional features.
Category
Cross-sectional
Features
Weight
Alfresco
Share
EGroup
ware
Liferay
Simple
Group
ware
TUTOS
Total score 100,00 76,00 94,00 96,00 75,00 28,00
Newsfeed 10,0
Syndication 2,00
Personalisation 8,00
Dashboard 5,00
Configurable areas 15,0
Mashup 2,00
Alerts 10,0
Tracking 3,00
Rating 3,00
Ranking 3,00
Filtering 4,00
Handheld delivery 10,0
Documentation 4,00
(online) Help 6,00
Search
Simple search 5,00
Complex search 10,0
Liferay and EGroupware almost fully support all
cross-sectional functionalities and thus provide high
integration of the features of all other categories.
5.6 Administration & Technology
The category administration & technology covers
features which are mainly important for the
administrator of the E-Collaboration system. With
respect to administration the definition of user
groups and roles turned out to be highly significant.
Furthermore, the smooth integration of the E-
Collaboration system into the existing system
landscape was regarded as a determining factor.
Finally, the possibility to customise the system
according to specific user requirements was
identified as an important aspect, too.
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Additionally, two groups of features especially
relevant for open source E-Collaboration systems
were identified: support & extendibility as well as
installation. Regarding support & extendibility, the
activity of the community serves as an indicator
about how actively the system is further developed
and how much support can be expected. Plugins &
API denotes the availability of a collection of
extensions and plugins and the existence of an API
that allows programming of self-written plugins.
Regarding installation, we distinguish between three
options: Repository installation refers to package
installation from the standard repositories of
common Linux distributions (checked with
Debian/Ubuntu); Download and config. refers to
installation via download and configuration from a
simple config file or web interface (requiring only a
running Apache/PHP/MySQL environment). While
these options are regarded as rather easy to be
installed, the third category advanced installation
refers to more complex installation procedures,
including having to (re-)compile the code from the
sources, or being based on specific database
configuration or server installation, etc.
Table 6: Features of category administration &
technology.
Category
Administration &
Technology
Weight Alfresco
Share
EGroup
ware
Liferay Simple
Group
ware
TUTOS
Total score 100,00 64,00 92,00 95,00 75,20 45,00
Monitoring 3,50
Reporting 5,60
Scalability 5,60
Configuration 7,00
Customisation 10,5
Designer toolkit 5,60
Integration 10,5
Backup/recovery 4,20
User Management 17,50
User groups/roles 14,0
Directory 3,50
Support and
Extendibility
18,00
Active community 10,0
Plugins, API 8,00
Installation 12,00
Repository installation 6,00
Download and config.
installation
4,00
Advanced installation 2,00
Liferay and EGroupware provide fully developed
administration facilities. Concerning support and
extendibility for further developing the system, apart
from TUTOS, all systems have got an active and
large community and offer a convenient way of
extending the existing features. While EGroupware,
Simple Groupware and TUTOS can be rather easily
installed with only basic system administration
skills, Alfresco and Liferay belong to the category
advanced installation which implies that a skilled
administrator is required to set up the system.
6 REVIEW
Table 7 summarises the scores out of 100% as the
total score for each category that the E-Collaboration
systems in the shortlist obtained in the categories
communication, coordination, collaboration and
connection as well as cross sectional features and
administration & technology. This table combines
the lines “total score” of Table 2 to 6 in a single
table including an arithmetic mean in each category.
Table 7 does not show an overall score for each of
the E-Collaboration systems (e.g. computed as an
arithmetic mean or a weighted sum), as the proposed
evaluation is based on the standard team
collaboration scenario briefly described in Section 4.
It should thus provide an overview of the results in
the various categories, so that the actual selection by
a specific SME can be based on the categories
relevant for the use case under consideration.
Table 7: Evaluation of five open source E-Collaboration
systems.
Alfresco
Share
EGroup
ware
Liferay Simple
Group
ware
TUTOS Average
Communication 50 % 63 % 86 % 51 % 45 % 59 %
Coordination 54 % 93 % 48 % 51 % 68 % 63 %
Collaboration 70 % 58 % 76 % 68 % 19 % 58 %
Connection 50 % 58 % 86 % 50 % 50 % 59 %
Cross sectional
features
76 % 94 % 96 % 75 % 28 % 74 %
Administration
& Technology
64 % 92 % 95 % 75 % 45 % 74 %
Alfresco provides very well supported and
integrated document and content management
features and thus got the highest scores in the
categories collaboration and cross-sectional features.
Alfresco belongs to the well known E-Collaboration
systems. It is widely used and thus well supported
with many reference installations.
EGroupware scores very highly in the category
coordination as it supports many project
management features and also special functionalities
for software development projects. The social aspect
is not a strength of EGroupware and the linking
between content and people providing the content is
not as transparent as in Liferay for example, which
puts a special emphasis on the social aspect and thus
got the highest score in the category connection.
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Even though EGroupware seems to have been
developed for collaboration in software development
projects, it is easy to use and provides many other
collaborative features apart from project
management. TUTOS on the other hand also scores
highly in the category coordination as it supports the
development of software projects from acquisition to
installation, but falls short concerning the other
categories and thus is not really suited for standard
team collaboration.
Although Simple Groupware is developed only
by a small company and does not seem to have a big
community, it appears technically mature. Simple
Groupware scores with its ability for managing
content in enterprise, project and personal spaces.
Due to limitations in usability and lack of project
management capabilities, Simple Groupware is well
suited only for small and medium size teams.
The studied systems differ in installability,
support, extendibility and maturity, which is typical
of open source systems. However, some of them are
also supported commercially for those not wanting
to hassle with technical issues themselves (in our
study: Alfresco, EGroupware, Liferay).
The evaluation of open source E-Collaboration
systems among standard closed source systems
showed that there are many technically mature open
source solutions. As the assessment in this paper
shows, a differentiated view on open source E-
Collaboration systems is necessary. In addition,
many open source systems provide complex
functionalities, offer support and training so they can
definitely be regarded as a serious alternative to
closed source platforms. Market readiness for open
source systems is also confirmed by market analysts
such as Gartner Research (Drakos et al., 2010) or
Forrester Research (Koplowitz, 2009), who list open
source systems such as MindTouch together with
well-known proprietary solutions.
7 CONCLUSIONS
Small and medium size enterprises as well as small
organisations, e.g. not-for-profit organisations, are
looking for E-Collaboration systems at a reasonable
price and workload to support their needs in
communication, collaboration and information
sharing among their team members. Open source
Enterprise 2.0 tools have shown to offer sufficient
functionalities to fulfill these requirements. These
tools have strengths in one or more basic interaction
processes of electronic collaboration – just like
comparable closed source systems have; and like
these systems, they also show weaknesses because
they do not support all features we identified to be
important for Enterprise 2.0 tools. When choosing
an open source E-Collaboration system, special
attention should be paid to installation, support and
operation options offered by open source systems,
especially since many vendors of commercial
systems offer easy deployment options like SaaS.
However, our analysis of the various installation
options provided for open source tools shows that
also a number of open source E-Collaboration
systems are easy to install and maintain.
This study provides enterprises – especially
SMEs – with a comprehensive set of evaluation
criteria focussing on communication, coordination,
collaboration and connection. In contrast to related
studies evaluating open source tools for electronic
collaboration, like Spath et al. (2007), our criteria
cover the entire spectrum of collaboration features
and represent state-of-the-art features of modern
Enterprise 2.0 systems. Especially with respect to
the category connection our evaluation approach
includes features for social networking which are not
covered by comparable assessments. In comparison
to the evaluation of E-Collaboration systems
presented by Büchner et al. (2009), which focus on
content-centric collaboration, our report also covers
features for communication and coordination. We do
not intend to present a market study on all major
open source Enterprise 2.0 systems such as
attempted by Spath et al. (2007), but to introduce an
easy to implement evaluation method. Since other
studies and reports like Büchner et al. (2009) include
either none or only a small number of open source
systems, SMEs will benefit from these results that
meet their limited resources.
Enterprises and organisations planning to
implement Enterprise 2.0 software will find a market
analysis of relevant open source tools and an
evaluation method that will help them to identify an
appropriate collaboration tool. The systematic
evaluation approach including a set of nearly 100
individual features in six distinct categories can be
applied to various types of Enterprise 2.0 and E-
Collaboration systems to provide a sound
assessment.
Detailed results on all open source tools included
in the longlist will be available in an online version
of the market study on Enterprise 2.0 tools. The
online version will also include commercial
platforms to allow for a comparison of open source
software and commercial tools. An even more
detailed analysis of selected collaboration tools will
rate individual features not in a binary mode –
A FEATURE-BASED ANALYSIS OF OPEN SOURCE TOOLS FOR ENTERPRISE 2.0 - Open Source Tools for Team
Collaboration in SMEs
65
supported
or not supported , but will apply
performance ratings on an appropriate scale.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was funded by FFG / Österreichische
Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH in grant No.
821111 "eCollaboration 2.0: Collaboration Tools
und Social Media für Teamarbeit in KMUs".
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