Though best known for its extensive suite of proprietary commercial products, as of late, Microsoft has been dabbling a lot more in the field of open-source development. Many suspect that this is due to rising competition from major open-source players such as Red Hat, Adobe and Google. It has just been revealed that Microsoft is working on a new content management software application along with a set of reusable compatible components. Going by the codename of Orchard, the software details will be shared at the TechEd Europe event. Perhaps the most surprising part about all of this is that Orchard is said to be a free open-source web CMS set to rival with popular systems such as Joomla, Mambo and Drupal.
While Microsoft is being tight-lipped and secretive about the project, we were able to gather some details on what is currently known about the Orchard CMS.
Orchard Overview
Orchard is Microsoft’s latest effort to distribute free open-source software with reusable components and a fully featured application capable of creating a wide variety of types of websites. The company’s core team of expert ASP.NET developers is actively seeking contributions and guidance from the community of .NET programmers to help get the project off on the right in the early goings. According to a representative from Microsoft, Bradley Millington, who has been anointed as Engineering Lead for the Orchid project, will be spearheading interactive discussions to invite the community to get actively involved on the ground floor. Millington will be accepting input to get better understanding of what developers would like to see in the project, the components they envision for their own applications, and how to encourage the community to contribute to make the project a success. Microsoft remarked that is open to discussing strategy, logistics, functionality and whatever else developers bring to the table.
Apparently, Orchard is not Microsoft’s first attempt in the open-source content management space. A while back, it was reported that the company was working on a CMS project called Oxite. In December of 2008, Microsoft made an alpha version of the Oxite source code available under the MS-P1 (Microsoft Public License). Mary Joe Foley of ZDNet hinted that Orchard could be right on time and become one of the first projects announced for the CodePlex Foundation. Created to allow for the exchange of code and collaboration among software vendors and the open-source developer community, the Foundation recently released the first working draft of its Project Acceptance and Operation Guidelines. When Foley asked if Orchard was simply a revamped version Oxite under a different name, Microsoft did not respond.
We all know that Microsoft is very skilled at keeping secrets and rolling out big surprises. Therefore, we just might have to wait until the TechEd Europe Session takes place on November 11 to get more comprehensive details on the Orchard project. As soon we get something more concrete, we will surely try to pass along the news.
