RedDot CMS

The RedDot CMS appears to be dead but not buried, with a new release built on top of Vignette, an expensive proprietary content management system.

RedDot used to be at www.reddot.com and is now at OpenText. The OpenText Web site mentions Web sites and content management but hardly ever mentions RedDot. OpenText appear to want to bury the RedDot brand and product to give OpenText the flexibility to sell whatever is most profitable. Based on experience from both the customer side and the vendor side, you do not want to be the customer of a company that buys a software product then buries it.

The are many examples you could look at. Some of the products purchased by Computer Associates are good examples. CA used to buy several products in one area then merge them. You buy product A then product A is taken over by CA and CA talk you into upgrading to product B because CA also own B. After the expensive conversion, you find that B is not as good as A, just more expensive. Then CA buys product C and tries to talk you into a conversion to products C. OpenText appears to have no long term roadmap for RedDot customers.

If you are not put off by the history of RedDot, you might be put off by the fact that it runs only on Windows. If RedDot was free, which it is not, RedDot would still be expensive because of the Windows licensing cost. A medium size Web site could cost AU$30,000 per year just for the Windows software licenses. Compare that to the zero cost of Linux. Now add support costs including people who are slightly more expensive and definitely harder to find.

Back when RedDot was RedDot, I evaluated RedDot for a couple of projects. One of the projects had no cost constraints, making commercial software a viable option. RedDot stood out in some areas but not in all areas and not in the areas important to the projects I worked on. RedDot looked like a good option for someone who had a lot of documents in Microsoft Exchange and wanted to keep them in Exchange while also publishing the documents on the Web. When I talked with customers using Exchange, the general conclusion is the content management system should replace Exchange, not try to keep both going at the same time.

There are other features the RedDot users talk about and those features are in the modern popular open source content management systems. Drupal, from version 6 onwards, can match RedDot by adding in some free open Drupal add-on modules. There are some places where Drupal is ahead of RedDot, including ecommerce. Based on the most common requirements for Web sites, there would be few cases where RedDot would be in your top two choices.