Money In Open Source Document Management?

September 21st, 2006: KnowledgeTree has launched a new reseller program to promote its open source document management solution.

Developed by Jam Warehouse in Cape Town, South Africa, KnowledgeTree is commercial open source web-based document management system. The company says that its solution enables an organisation to secure, share, track and manage documents and records, and do it all via a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Built on the popular open source LAMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack, KnowledgeTree says it’s software features drag and drop access to the document repository from the Windows desktop, integrated access to the document repository within Microsoft Office applications, direct scanning into the repository and more. At least for the commercial versions.

The software is open source, however, it comes in three flavours: enterprise edition, SMB edition and the free open source edition. Where they differ, apart from price, is in features and support. The enterprise and SMB editions come with varying levels of priority access to experienced support and development engineers, quarterly updates, Microsoft application integration and direct scanning to the reposition to start with, while the open source edition comes with the web interface and community support only.

KnowledgeTree is trying to fuel the takeup of its software by giving it’s partners a bigger slice of the revenue pie. It says over 60 companies currently belong to its partner programme and provide infrastructure, implementation, training and onsite support services around both the open source and commercial editions of KnowledgeTree.

“KnowledgeTree partner companies now have an opportunity to earn up to 30% on the retail price of commercial editions of KnowledgeTree,” says Daniel Chalef of KnowledgeTree developers Jam Warehouse. “Since commercial editions of KnowledgeTree are subscription-based, partner companies have the opportunity to build substantial annuity income streams.”

KnowledgeTree is available now free for open source downloads, and US$2200 per annum and US$5500 per CPU per annum for the SMB and Enterprise editions respectively.

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