But with Windows entrenched throughout the company, Hecht settled on a more pragmatic hybrid approach: an open-source content management server from Alfresco Software Inc., backed up by open-source applications MySQL, Apache Tomcat and JBoss -- all running on top of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Server operating system.

Open-source desktop technologies, such as the Open-Office application suite and Firefox Web browser, have long had their greatest uptake from Windows users. Back-end software has been a different matter, though. Microsoft and open-source vendors have portrayed the choice of which products to use as a black-and-white decision: Microsoft's all-inclusive .Net infrastructure or the LAMP stack, which includes Linux, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and either the Perl, Python or PHP programming language.

But Hecht is part of a growing wave of users opting for a third way that some have dubbed WAMP. Advocates of the Windows-based approach say that it provides the best of both worlds.

"Would I want to put it all on Linux? Yeah, that's the geek in me," Hecht said this month. "But the Alfresco application doesn't necessarily run better under Linux."

And although the need to license Windows may make the new content management system more expensive than it would have been with Linux-based hardware, not having to hire additional IT workers or retrain existing staffers to support the open-source operating system makes "the whole thing a wash" financially, Hecht said. Informa is currently running the system in pilot mode.