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In Part 1 of this series, I painted a very rosy picture of open source intranet software. But open source isn't for everyone or every situation. For all the advantages open source software can give you, it's not always the easiest to set up if you're not technically inclined. And it can be difficult to sell the open source idea to senior management. Sometimes it's just easier to go with one of the "Big Guys" to make your intranet life easier.

You don't need to be a techno-whiz

Free, open source software is available to everyone, but you still need to have the technical know-how to put all the pieces together -- installing and configuring the intranet software; installing and configuring its associated database; and most importantly, setting up the appropriate application and content security for users and content managers. Drupal, for instance, is extremely powerful and customizable, but there's a very steep learning curve to overcome before you can take full advantage of the software's true power.

Although open source intranet tools are getting easier to install and set up, it's still a do-it-yourself process. Most of these open source suites are optimized on an open source solution stack, using databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL and Web servers like Apache. But what are the chances that you'll already have these components running in a production environment within your organization? Choosing an open source intranet solution, therefore, means that you'll have to not only overcome the learning curve associated with the tool itself, but also all the other open source components in the solution stack.

If you're not up to this challenge or you don't have the time to overcome the learning curve, you can save a lot of hair-pulling aggravation by choosing a proprietary, commercial intranet suite that's ready to use out-of-the-box. Developers of proprietary, commercial intranet suites go to great lengths to hide the nuts-and-bolts from customers. They try to make their software as quick and easy to install and set up as possible -- even by those with limited technical ability -- by encapsulating many of the tool's components into its installation package.

Comfort from an established company

Open source software is usually built and managed by a seemingly ethereal body of developers known only as "the community". But these open source developers join and leave the community all the time, and the community as a whole might decide one day that it no longer wishes to continue with the project. Some software adopters will find this lack of stability in community-based development a bit risky.

It's not uncommon for an open source project to reach an apex and then begin a steady decline as the project community loses both interest and developers. If an open source project is abandoned by its community of developers, and you don't have any in-house expertise, you might find yourself running an obsolete tool with very few avenues of support. Large, established commercial software firms have huge market shares and customer bases. Adopters of proprietary software from established companies such as IBM or Microsoft like the feeling of security that comes from knowing these companies are not likely to disappear overnight.

Easier to convince senior management

Despite the advances of open source software, many non-IT people still view open source as "not serious". They still have a misperceived notion that open source software is developed and maintained by an unorganized group of misanthropic technoweenies hiding in some damp basement. Unfortunately, many of these non-IT people are the same people who sign the checks for large-scale projects such as intranets.

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