The SilverStripe CMS project

Your Nomination
Title for nomination: 

The SilverStripe CMS project

Nominee's name or organisation: 

Sigurd Magnusson at SilverStripe Ltd

Overview of your nomination: 

SilverStripe CMS is a prime example of New Zealand built, developed, and marketed open source software. Known as a 'web content management system', the software is used to build and manage complex websites, web-applications, and intranets. It is used by a large number of government departments and businesses. Since winning Best Open Source Project in 2008 NZOSA awards, the software has matured in terms of adoption, technical feature set, documentation, and its open source community. It has now been downloaded over 325,000 times and reviews continue to show it as more user friendly than alternative products. Its rise in adoption in the past two years has served to save government and businesses money, created more than 20 jobs at SilverStripe Ltd, brought in and kept money in New Zealand, and increased New Zealand's status in the open source and the web divisions of the global software market.

Reasons for winning this award: 

We understand the the award "recognises the free and open source software that has had the biggest positive impact on New Zealand in the past two years." The impact we see is as follows: - Cost savings to NZ Government and businesses who adopt our software, in terms of reduction/elimination of software licenses compared with alternative software. - Cost savings to NZ Government and businesses who adopt our software, and who choose to use internal resources to build, customise and extend our software for their projects. Many large organisations have internal skilled IT or web staff who are cheaper than outsourcing this work to software or web design/development consultancies. This is possible because our software source code and documentation are made available. - Increased productivity, based on our software being easier to use and more productive to use, than other products in the market place. - Approximately 20 new jobs, in terms of new staff employed by SilverStripe Ltd on the back of our software adoption fueling company growth. We understand that several other website development companies who utilise our software for their work have grown staff considerably, and have attributed this growth to our software bringing them efficiency and being attractive to their customers. - Our software is used in innovative online projects such as data.govt.nz, elections2010.co.nz, and has helped to open government data in councils and central government agencies (e.g. www.trc.govt.nz) - Domestic spending, both in terms of customers spending their dollars with our company and our partners instead of international competitors, and in terms of our international customers working with us.

Supporting Information
Use and benefits of open source: 

SilverStripe CMS is an open source project released under the BSD license. While a company (SilverStripe Ltd) maintains control over the code, we have a number of measures to ensure that principles of open source are maintained. For example, 1. the open source software is the only version of the software; it is not a crippled or "less enterprise" version of a "proper" commercial version. 2. our source code is available in a public source code repository (Subversion), as is public bug trackers, development mailing lists, forums, the ability for third party developers to upload modules, extensions, and themes to the silverstripe.org websites, and so on. Organisations such as State Services Commission and Greater Wellington Regional Council have used SilverStripe CMS in an otherwise Microsoft IT environment (Our software is typically installed on a Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP stack, however in the case of these customers, the software runs on Microsoft Windows Server operating system, IIS web server, and stores its content in SQL Server 2008 databases.) If organisations like this were to procure within the Microsoft family of products, this could suggest adopting a product such as SharePoint, which includes a per-user licensing as part of its pricing scheme. In addition, many of our customers work with us whereby we provide mentoring, and the bulk of development is done in-house, which is feasible due to our source code being available, documentation being sufficient, and and community resources such as support forums being effective. Wellington City Council rebuild their intranet using internal resources in the past 12 months and provides an example of this. Many organisations (most of the organisations listed in the next question "recent achievements" below) have funded or provided code back to our software product. Therefore, use and benefits of open source include customers/users having more control over their software projects, reducing complexity by reusing current IT infrastructure and in-house resources, and reducing cost. Separately, open source licensing and its associated philosophy has allowed the global marketing of our software to be done in a far more efficient and cost effective way than traditional approaches, and in a form that produces good-will rather than antagonism.

Recent achievements: 

SilverStripe won Best Open Source Project in the NZOSA 2008 awards. At that time, the software had gained interest based on the recent accomplishment of building and launching a complex piece of software to an international standard, with the software being more user-friendly and more programmer-friendly than other open source and commercially licensed alternatives. The software had made notable headway in terms of global marketing online and had begun to gain major New Zealand and international customers (e.g. US Democratic Party), and had a small but healthy open source community surrounding the software. Wellington-based SilverStripe Ltd built and funded the software. The company's decision to release its primary intellectual property under an open source license (BSD), and derive benefits in terms of marketing and increased sales of professional services to do with the software, provided a concrete example for open source advocates to showcase to the New Zealand business community. In the past two years since the NZOSA 2008 award, SilverStripe CMS has matured in two substantial ways: 1. Commercial Adoption Being free to download, it is easy for open source projects to be downloaded by large numbers of people. In our case, there are now more than 325,000 downloads of the SilverStripe CMS software, the majority of which are from the past two years. In addition, however, the calibre of users of this software has increased dramatically over the past 24 months. For example, New Zealand government agencies using SilverStripe CMS for a website, intranet, or web-application now include: Broadcasting Standards Authority Central Hawkes Bay District Council Commerce Commission Department of Internal Affairs Electricity Commission Gisborne District Council Greater Wellington Regional Council Horizons Regional Council Hurunui District Council Land Information New Zealand Manukau City Council Ministry of Economic Development Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry of Justice Ministry of Health Ministry of Research, Science & Technology Nelson City Council NIWA NZQA Privacy Commission Rodney City Council Southland District Council State Services Commission Taranaki Regional Council Tasman District Council The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and Air New Zealand are examples of well known New Zealand organisations outside of the public sector who also use SilverStripe CMS. The Ohio State University Library, the popular PlayStation/XBOX game Guitar Hero, the US Communist Party, the Philadelphia Police Department also have SilverStripe CMS powered websites. The customer list listed here, by and large, goes through a structured and formal process to evaluate alternatives when purchasing or adopting new software. The list therefore serves to illustrate that our software is useful and compelling to high-calibre customers and users. As pointed out earlier, most of the above list have contributed code to the project, either by funding this through our company, or in the case of a few, writing code and submitting this to the project. 2. Improvement and refinement of the SilverStripe CMS software The second general area where the SilverStripe CMS project has matured has been the improvement and refinement of the product itself, and its related resources, such as documentation. Based on feedback in our open source forums, mailing lists, and twitter, and from requests by our customers, and our own ideas, the SilverStripe CMS product has undergone significant improvements. For example, our software historically could only store data in the MySQL database, and our community was asking for support for Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL so that existing data stored in those databases could be easily used in SilverStripe CMS projects. SilverStripe released support for both databases in early 2010, and has emerging support for Oracle and SQLite databases now. Most other content management systems do not provide this amount of choice for how to store their data. Other examples of product improvement relate to improved usability, performance, security, data integrity, handling of video, and supporting HTML 5 and mobile phone templates. Documentation of a product is just as important to software as the code is. The adoption and success of software is reliant on people knowing how to use it. Poor documentation is a historical criticism of open source software. SilverStripe CMS had good introductory but poor advanced level documentation, but in 2009 we published two books of 450 page length to address this. One in German, a major market for our software, and one in English. The books were published by existing well-known book publishers to aid credibility and distribution. At launch, the English book showed up in 'Top 100 Best Seller' lists on Amazon.com in relevant categories (e.g. web programming).

Plans for future work: 

In the coming 12 months we expect to perform a major revamp of our user interface, to retain its status of having a leading user interface in the coming years. We also look to invest substantially further in documentation, and further our web-based marketing efforts, which we hope will increase the size and nature of our open source user and developer community.

Websites and other information: 

http://www.silverstripe.org - website for our SilverStripe CMS open source project, including downloads, community forums, documentation, demo, etc. http://www.silverstripe.com - website for our company, including the professional services we provide and the case studies where our services have been used. http://www.silverstripe.org/awards-and-reviews - Awards and Reviews as provided by other parties. http://www.cmswire.com/downloads/cms-market-share/ - Market-share report for open source CMS products globally. (Free but requires email/name registration to download).