A new, open source web content management system hit the scene this past week, making its debut as the engine behind Visitmix.com. But what sets Oxite apart isn't its feature set, but rather the development team behind it - Microsoft.MIX is one of Microsoft's major developer conferences. When the MIX Online team set out to create Visitmix.com, a companion site for the developer community, they decided to tap some internal Microsoft resources to build a content management system for the backend. The results were so good that the development team decided to release the CMS - built on Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC framework - to the public as a freestanding tool.

From the description on the Oxite information page:

Oxite is an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites. We know this because it runs MIX Online.

As strong an offering as SharePoint is, I've often felt that one of its weak points is web content management. There are certainly lots of options for a Microsoft shop - on the open-source side there's DotNetNuke, which runs on the .Net framework, and there are a number of vendors promising web content management systems that integrate (with varying levels of success) with SharePoint.

With Oxite, however, Microsoft subtly turns an interesting corner. It's free, open source and from everything I've seen so far, pretty darn impressive for a tool that's not even in beta yet. I'm really excited to see what's next.

It's certainly possible that Microsoft could ultimately "productize" Oxite, or roll some of its functionality into a future release of SharePoint. But for now let's just enjoy the ride. To get more technical information and to download the Oxite alpha, visit Codeplex.com/oxite.