CMS Watch Plone Feed

Innovations in Digital Asset Management, Circa 2008

info@databasepublish.com(Joseph Bachana) — Wed, 7 May 2008 15:51:00 -0400

The Digital Asset Management (DAM) marketplace doesn't receive a lot of attention, but DPCI's Joseph Bachana argues that some very interesting developments are transpiring. The problem is, no single vendor has a lock on how to combine all these innovations into a comprehensive offering...

Open source should mean open discussions about open roadmaps

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 05:21:00 -0500

Last week I wrote a commentary on whether the future of Plone lies in web publishing. This was based on a candid blog posting by Plone co-founder Alexander Limi, where he said that the community should "realize that web publishing isn't our main area."

This quickly lead an Italian blogger to conclude that Plone wants to copycat SharePoint. Quite a stretch in my view. Since then I've received several phone calls and private e-mails pressuring me to change the commentary. A Plone consultant complained that my posting created fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about the future of Plone, a future which, according to the consultant undoubtedly was in web publishing.

The reality is that Limi clearly sparked an important discussion. As of today at least 114 messages on the Plone mailing list relate to Limi's controversial posting. It is normal for visionary leaders to make comments about product futures that can make consultancies uncomfortable. Clearly those consultancies with Plone-based web publishing projects under their belt have a vested interest in the status quo.

In my experience it's commercial vendors who put pressure on analysts. But as the stakes get bigger for large communities like Plone, so too rises their pressure. Some open source communities don't have roadmap discussions in the open, but instead hold important debates behind closed doors with top stakeholders, the way commercial firms do. So my response to the various entreaties to change my blog posting is: Plone should welcome outsiders' perspectives, hold public discussions on the future of the platform, and if Limi believes he was misunderstood, he can clarify his opinions in such a way that the whole world can read them.

The future of Plone -- not in web publishing?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Mon, 4 Feb 2008 11:30:00 -0500

In a candid blog posting, project co-founder Alexander Limi lists 18 things he "wishes were true" about the open source Portal / CMS platform, Plone. Limi has remained a leading light in the Plone community despite his day job at Google.

His list shows a kind of strategic vision and candor about failings -- things we find lacking in most other open source enterprise portals. If you're an adopter of any technology, you want to see open communication about the strategic direction of a product. Across the spectrum of commercial vendors and open source projects it is also very hard to find vendors candid about the strengths and weaknesses of their product. To be sure, Limi's word isn't law: Plone is managed by a separate foundation, but still the post is revealing.

One of his more provocative statements was that Plone's future does not lie in web publishing. This may become true, but in our research for The Enterprise Portals Report - 2008 we found that Plone today is actually a potential fit for Web Publishing scenarios. Many Plone adopters select the platform precisely because it is a kind of combo Web CMS / Portal, but Limi recommends that the community should "realize that web publishing isn't our main area." Instead he suggests focusing on intranet deployments, collaborative workspaces, and document management -- in short, the increasingly crowded space that SharePoint has so effectively addressed.

Later this week the Plone Foundation is organizing a Strategic Planning Summit with the goal of creating a plan for the future of Plone. Surely Limi's list will be helpful for the discussion. While Plone maintains a publicly available roadmap it is quite thin on details beyond Version 3.1, which is slated for April release. Hopefully a few roadmap decisions will be made shortly, so that the faithful Plone adopters have enough time to digest the impact on their projects.

Enterprise Portal Marketplace: 2008 Vendor Risk Profile

jb@boyeit.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:01:00 -0500

It is all too easy to identify vendors for your shortlist based on their supposed "leadership" status in the market. But CMS Watch contributing analyst Janus Boye argues that CIOs, procurement officers, and other technology leaders considering investments in enterprise portals should carefully examine the risk profile of prospective vendors to help identify the right "fit" for their needs.

Plone: What's in a name...

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:15:00 -0400

Earlier this month at the annual Plone Conference 2007, the consulting firm "Plone Solutions" announced it would change its name to "Jarn." Plone Solutions / Jarn has been among the most experienced Plone system integrators, in particular since one of its founders was also a founder of Plone.

So why change such an esteemed name? The company cites "commitment to the community, to the Plone Foundation, and to a fair and open marketplace around Plone." This certainly makes sense and is a smart community-relations move, but still a step that many other open source firms have not taken, e.g., Alfresco, Magnolia, or eXo. If you're an Alfresco (the tool) integrator, it kind of sucks to compete against Alfresco (the company).

So I think avoiding having a commercial firm by the same name represents an important measure of a true community-oriented project. Remember that the community around your product of choice can make a significant difference to your project, in particular for open source tools.

New Plone 3 delayed until July

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Mon, 28 May 2007 16:27:00 -0400

After a few delays, the new version of Plone is due out quite soon. With significant user interface modifications, Plone is trying to address existing weaknesses while also adding new features. At the moment new customers face a tough choice of whether to start their projects on the existing version 2.5.3 or the new 3.0 Beta Release 3. Some partners recommend to start with 3.0, while others find it too immature and push 2.5.x. As with any major new release, experience will remain limited for awhile. Plone really lives in its own freestanding universe, but can offer a good fit for simpler portal projects. The recently released Enterprise Portals Report takes a detailed and critical look at what's new in Plone 3.

Portal Kudos and Shortcomings -- Summer, 2006

jb@boyeit.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 15:24:00 -0400

Segmenting the portal software marketplace by putting products into boxes on charts is a popular exercise among pundits. But CMS Watch contributing analyst Janus Boye argues that for buyers, a meaningful vendor breakdown must describe how well the various offerings fit actual requirements across specific business scenarios. See how Janus compares the major portal products in the marketplace today...

Alfresco vs. Plone

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 07:21:00 -0500

When Alfresco made a noisy launch earlier this year, the new project put some noses out of joint elsewhere in the open-source CM community by claiming the mantle of "first open-source ECM platform." In particular, some in the Plone community pointed out that Plone was frequently used in the wild for managing documents, not just HTML text. Well, along comes Seth Gottlieb with a typically detailed comparison of the 2 platforms. It turns out they each have some strengths (and weaknesses), and appear to be targeted at different use-cases.

I want my CMS TV?

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 21:33:00 -0500

Earlier this week CMS vendor Hannon Hill announced the launch of "CMS Tube," a site providing video and podcasts about their product, Cascade Server. The idea is to help current and prospective customers learn more about the product via demos, training and education, with commentary and discussions with other users as well. Similar resources have also sprung up around open source projects, such as Drupal and Plone. But Hannon Hill, a smallish company of just over 30 employees, hired a media producer to run CMS Tube. I'm not surprised by this, however, given a growing trend towards building user communities, but at first blush, this site is all one-way: no comments, no tags, no user-uploaded media. Also, video is scant substitute for being able to reach a real person when you need one, so don't consider VendorTube a substitute for your support contract, but it can provide a useful supplement.

Plone Solutions co-founder takes new job at Google -- updated

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 3 Aug 2006 09:06:00 -0400

The popular open source CMS and portal Plone has seen one of it forceful leaders take a new job at Google. According to recent news Alexander Limi is taking on a new position as User Interface Designer at Google. Limi has been important to the Plone community as one of the roadmap setters. Limi will no longer consult day-to-day with his commercial services firm Plone Solutions, but will remain on the board. The community is obviously bigger than Limi, and the Plone Foundation will continue handling the development, marketing and legal affairs of Plone. CMS Report co-author and open source expert Seth Gottlieb offers his view. A mature open-source platform -- CMS or portal -- should be able to flourish independently of few key individuals. We know several such platforms that remain personality-driven. The coming months and years will show how Plone will be affected by Limi now working at a major commercial software company. [Update, August 3: Limi points out that he will stay active in the Plone community and continue to work on the project one day a week at Google. We regret suggesting otherwise. Google does indeed maintain good relationships with various open source projects. Still, it will be interesting to see whether and how Google and Plone's interests diverge over the coming years. Try googling "content management" and note the first paid ad at the top of the results...]

Plone 2.5: Catching up with Zope

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 15:56:00 -0400

The Plone Foundation has recently announced the new Plone 2.5. According to the press release, the new version comes with performance improvements and also focused on "streamlining code, strengthening stability, and increasing flexibility." Just like the recent upgrade to BEA Portal which caught up with the underlying platform (BEA WebLogic), Plone is catching up to Zope. As Enterprise Portal Report readers know, Zope is now in version 3.2, but existing Plone installations still runs on the older and very different Zope 2. Plone 2.5 sets the groundwork for the anticipated 3.0 release, available early 2007, which will come with substantial user interface improvements and also run on even newer versions of Zope. With a major new release around the corner, new Plone users should consider waiting to avoid a complex and potentially expensive upgrade. Note that some third party components may not (yet) work with Plone 2.5. [Updated: August 2]

eRoom: Documentum on the cheap?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 15 May 2006 14:39:00 -0400

A savvy EMC|Documentum integration partner shared an observation recently that some new Documentum customers were opting for the company's collaboration product, eRoom, for basic document management. Like Documentum's Records Manager product, eRoom today still has its own separate repository and set of basic repository services, including workflow. In short, it's self-contained. But unlike Documentum's core Content Server, eRoom is relatively cheap (~$50k) and doesn't require scads of add-on modules and consultants to get running. "Customers get the cachet of Documentum without the expense," the partner concluded. Yeah, well, that's true, until licensees want to "upgrade" to something more substantial and realize that they have to swap in an entirely different Documentum infrastructure. Still, the phenonemon validates what we've been saying for a while: the world wants simple document management, even if we have to buy collaboration systems like eRoom, SharePoint, or Plone to get it.

Could Eclipse be your ECM client?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 07:16:00 -0500

I've seen various applications built off the noted open-source Eclipse IDE, and occasionally someone muses that perhaps that this developer environment could make a nice common contribution platform for real content authors as well. Now open-source developers at Nuxeo have proposed "Apogee," an ECM client based on Eclipse. In the past, I have argued for this sort of collaboration on common services, but I'm skeptical about the need for thick clients. Moreover, using Eclipse could just perpetuate the common myth that content managers simply need dumbed-down developer interfaces. More interesting is Nuxeo's latest version of its ECM platform, called CPS, which is built off Zope. Read about it on Slashdot. Unlike Plone, Nuxeo tries to incorporate traditional ECM services like records management. As a 30-person company, Nuxeo ranks as one of the larger open-source project sponsors in this space, although its platform is perhaps not commensurately well-known. Based in France, Nuxeo has struggled a bit to get serious adoption outside francophonie.

Future of Plone

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 22:44:00 -0500

A roadmap was released last week for no less than three upcoming versions of Plone. Details include an upcoming maintenance release (2.1.3 -- notably with better WebDAV support), the next infrastructure release (2.5), and the next major release (3.0). Plone has a large and diverse community, but it seems that project co-founder Alexander Limi -- who came out with this technology vision -- remains a forceful leader. Still, the power of the community has been illustrated nicely in the Plone 3.0 discussion thread, which has evolved into a nice discussion of AJAX frameworks and which approach Plone should adopt.

Content and technology standards in New Zealand

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 9 Dec 2005 12:27:00 -0500

The New Zealand national government has embarked on developing a "national content strategy" (via Hilary Marsh). That's ambitious, inasmuch as most other countries are still struggling with metadata standards. Perhaps predictably, the NZ national e-government team has released and encouraged the use of a standard CMS -- in this case, a version of Plone that has been modified to accommodate some kiwi-specific accessibility standards. Similar product-standardization efforts in other countries have not fared particularly well, mostly because the use-cases across multiple government entities diverge more than enough to nix the broad applicability of any single tool. And indeed in New Zealand, the main e-gov site itself has a particularly "Plonish" feel to it, though that works fine for a portal containing mostly links. Plone might not work well for other scenarios. As CMS Report readers know, it is not ideal for those cases where content pre-generation are required. To be fair, the kiwis seem only to be promoting their version of Plone, not mandating its use (e.g. their official digital strategy site runs on a Swedish commercial CMS, EPiServer). This strikes me as a good balance: start with content standards, then look at tool standards.