[Evangelism] Article: Is Plone a Good CMS

[Matt Hamilton]

Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'

http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/

A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

-Matt

[Dylan Jay]

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

It's a very sticky question which we've recently been dealing with a
gov in our country. Probity is very important for governments it
seems, or at least ours. We do seem to be making real progress and
were thinking of giving a talk at the conference about this subject.
You must have come up with similar barriers with your gov work Matt?

[Matt Hamilton]

Post by Dylan Jay

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

It's a very sticky question which we've recently been dealing with a
gov in our country. Probity is very important for governments it
seems, or at least ours. We do seem to be making real progress and
were thinking of giving a talk at the conference about this subject.
You must have come up with similar barriers with your gov work Matt?

To be honest, we've not really come across it yet, but we don't do a
massive amount of govt. work. What we have done in govt has all been
with clients who are already using Plone and need additional help.

The UK Govt has recently come out to say that Open Source should be
considered in equal terms to Commercial, but AFAIK they don't
recommend any one system. There was a project called DOTP -
Delivering on The Promise, which was meant to be a single CMS system
developed for the government. But uh.... it failed to deliver on the
promise and has been quietly taken out back shot and buried.

-Matt

[Matt Hamilton]

Post by Dylan Jay

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

It's a very sticky question which we've recently been dealing with a
gov in our country. Probity is very important for governments it
seems, or at least ours. We do seem to be making real progress and
were thinking of giving a talk at the conference about this subject.
You must have come up with similar barriers with your gov work Matt?

To be honest, we've not really come across it yet, but we don't do a
massive amount of govt. work. What we have done in govt has all been
with clients who are already using Plone and need additional help.

The UK Govt has recently come out to say that Open Source should be
considered in equal terms to Commercial, but AFAIK they don't
recommend any one system. There was a project called DOTP -
Delivering on The Promise, which was meant to be a single CMS system
developed for the government. But uh.... it failed to deliver on the
promise and has been quietly taken out back shot and buried.

-Matt

[Matt Hamilton]

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

-Matt

[Jon Stahl]

Well done, Martin, Ken et al!

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a good
CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by Martin
Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights into 'big firm'
consulting and how they go about things.
-Matt
--
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. ? ? ? ? ? Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? [phone]
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism

[Jon Stahl]

Well done, Martin, Ken et al!

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a good
CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by Martin
Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights into 'big firm'
consulting and how they go about things.
-Matt
--
Matt Hamilton ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? matth at netsight.co.uk
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. ? ? ? ? ? Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? [phone]
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
Evangelism at lists.plone.org
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism

[Matt Hamilton]

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

In a further development on this, I privately emailed Janus to ask him:

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger consulting
companies?"

As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies are
*really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception thing. His
response as this:

"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.

Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."

This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are some
larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and Sitecore,
but when that company needs to do something low end they are using
Umbraco.

So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community? Are
there companies out there that say something like 'We normally use
Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?

At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.

What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.

-Matt

[Karl Horak]

Post by Matt Hamilton
...
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community? Are
there companies out there that say something like 'We normally use
Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.
-Matt

Our corporate IT folks have been studying enterprise CMS for years. Our
internal portal has gone from Vignette to Oracle to (probably) JBoss.
SharePoint is used for a tremendous number of internal collaboration sites.

Meanwhile, for external use, my small group has been using Plone for over 5
years and its success is starting to catch the attention of corporate
decision-makers.

Gotta busy day and will expand in detail later.

Karl

[Hanno Schlichting]

At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big boys
saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the message that
Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/cheaper etc' than the
big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.

I think it depends highly on your perception of what small / medium /
large here means. Is a small CMS a personal Wordpress blog or one-off
brochure-ware site? Plone isn't very competitive in that scale unless
you have already invested in Plone.

Looking at the projects we do over here, we have anything from what we
call small 10 to 50 hours projects, medium sized 50 - 250 hour
projects and numerous large projects that exceed that scale. Our
largest project right now is a multi-year project soon going to hit
8000 development hours, an intranet for an international company with
about 5000 logged in users. Doing a project of that scale with an
essentially 10 man company next to other stuff isn't easy and has some
challenges. But looking at those numbers I find it quite hard to judge
what constitutes a small or large project and how that relates to
"what the big boys" do.

Hanno

[Dylan Jay]

---
Dylan Jay, Plone Solutions Manager
www.pretaweb.com
tel:[phone]
mob:[phone]
skype:dylan_jay

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger consulting
companies?"
As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies
are *really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception
"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end
alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.
Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."
This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are
some larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and
Sitecore, but when that company needs to do something low end they
are using Umbraco.
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community?
Are there companies out there that say something like 'We normally
use Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?

I was talking two a founder of a .net/sharepoint shop the other day. A
couple of things are interesting.

1) .net/sharepoint seems pretty common (or other CMS). Consultancies
working on bespoke work at the .net level and doing CMS work when
called on. I've come across some bigger java/jboss type shops that are
similar. I suspect they are supported by big corporate custom systems,
the sort of thing that doesn't get done in python. Being a generalised
software consulatncy is going to broaden your client base and so
increase your growth as a company I suspect.

2) They do ok for reselling sharepoint licenses. It's extra revenue.
And in general the market value of .net work is higher than python.

I'm not sure where this leaves us, but I think that it is really
interesting that plone as a community doesn't know much about its
integrators. A survey on all the companies servicing plone would make
an excellent talk at the conference... at least for me.

Think about it this way. If Plone were a propriatory product, the
mother company would know a awful lot about it's value added
resellers. The reason is, they are an essential part of creating a
successful product. Modern software companies know that enabling your
channel partners and resellers to make a successful business means the
product gets out there and in more useful ways than the mother company
ever could by itself. Plone as a community is as interested in growth
as much any propriatory company is. Understanding our who our
integrators are could be a valuable first step to increasing it's take
up.

Post by Matt Hamilton
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.

We generally pitch it as an enterprise system for those that want more
flexibility. Plone isn't really simple enough for a small web
consultancy to pick up for the odd jobs. It's really a full time
thing. We also try to sell it into the bigger market because plone
plone can compete where others can't... workflow, flexible security,
web document management, multisite deployments, so the customers value
it more.

If you want something to put up a quick brochure ware site then your
compete against all teh cheap php coders and it's a waste of plone
talent.

Post by Matt Hamilton
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.
-Matt
--
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk [phone]
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism

[Matt Hamilton]

Post by Dylan Jay
I'm not sure where this leaves us, but I think that it is really
interesting that plone as a community doesn't know much about its
integrators. A survey on all the companies servicing plone would
make an excellent talk at the conference... at least for me.
Think about it this way. If Plone were a propriatory product, the
mother company would know a awful lot about it's value added
resellers. The reason is, they are an essential part of creating a
successful product. Modern software companies know that enabling
your channel partners and resellers to make a successful business
means the product gets out there and in more useful ways than the
mother company ever could by itself. Plone as a community is as
interested in growth as much any propriatory company is.
Understanding our who our integrators are could be a valuable first
step to increasing it's take up.

Right. This was something I talked to Dave Shapiro (and Karl Horek
maybe?) about at the last Plone Conf. We were talking about a 'Plone
Census' of some kind. Using the details that are in plone.net to start
with we were going to call/email around every company listed on
plone.net (break it up into sections and divide to a group of
volunteers) and 1) prompt each of them to update their details on
plone.net. 2) prompt them about sponsorship etc. We were also I think
going to try and get some more metrics and information from them.

I really think that plone.net could possibly do with some love
beforehand, and bring it on brand with the new plone.org. Then maybe
do a push to integrators after that.

I like the talk idea. What sort of form would you see it having? Would
it be a case of a survey done beforehand and then the results
announced, discussed etc during the talk? There is going to a un-
conference style day as one day of the Plone Conf in which talks will
be spontaneously proposed, maybe it could be something you might want
to champion there?

Post by Dylan Jay

Post by Matt Hamilton
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does
use both messages.

We generally pitch it as an enterprise system for those that want
more flexibility. Plone isn't really simple enough for a small web
consultancy to pick up for the odd jobs. It's really a full time
thing. We also try to sell it into the bigger market because plone
plone can compete where others can't... workflow, flexible security,
web document management, multisite deployments, so the customers
value it more.
If you want something to put up a quick brochure ware site then your
compete against all teh cheap php coders and it's a waste of plone
talent.

I agree 100% with this. And I think we pitch it at a similar market to
you guys.

What I guess I really wanted to get some thoughts on in this thread
was the topic that Janus raised in his blog post and email... about
Plone consultancy company sizes versus other projects (such as
Umbraco). Does size matter? If so, why? Comparing Umbraco's 'certified
partner' list there is 15 companies listed, versus over 300 on
plone.net. Does the number of companies matter? Umbraco also have a
list of 'certified developers' who have undergone some kind of test
(10 multiple choice questions from a random pool). They have 150
developers listed there. We have 120 Plone Foundation members. I know
we've talked about certification and what it means many times before
in the Plone community, and I don't think we ever reached any kind of
decision.

So... does size matter?

-Matt

[Matt Hamilton]

Post by Dylan Jay
I'm not sure where this leaves us, but I think that it is really
interesting that plone as a community doesn't know much about its
integrators. A survey on all the companies servicing plone would
make an excellent talk at the conference... at least for me.
Think about it this way. If Plone were a propriatory product, the
mother company would know a awful lot about it's value added
resellers. The reason is, they are an essential part of creating a
successful product. Modern software companies know that enabling
your channel partners and resellers to make a successful business
means the product gets out there and in more useful ways than the
mother company ever could by itself. Plone as a community is as
interested in growth as much any propriatory company is.
Understanding our who our integrators are could be a valuable first
step to increasing it's take up.

Right. This was something I talked to Dave Shapiro (and Karl Horek
maybe?) about at the last Plone Conf. We were talking about a 'Plone
Census' of some kind. Using the details that are in plone.net to start
with we were going to call/email around every company listed on
plone.net (break it up into sections and divide to a group of
volunteers) and 1) prompt each of them to update their details on
plone.net. 2) prompt them about sponsorship etc. We were also I think
going to try and get some more metrics and information from them.

I really think that plone.net could possibly do with some love
beforehand, and bring it on brand with the new plone.org. Then maybe
do a push to integrators after that.

I like the talk idea. What sort of form would you see it having? Would
it be a case of a survey done beforehand and then the results
announced, discussed etc during the talk? There is going to a un-
conference style day as one day of the Plone Conf in which talks will
be spontaneously proposed, maybe it could be something you might want
to champion there?

Post by Dylan Jay

Post by Matt Hamilton
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does
use both messages.

We generally pitch it as an enterprise system for those that want
more flexibility. Plone isn't really simple enough for a small web
consultancy to pick up for the odd jobs. It's really a full time
thing. We also try to sell it into the bigger market because plone
plone can compete where others can't... workflow, flexible security,
web document management, multisite deployments, so the customers
value it more.
If you want something to put up a quick brochure ware site then your
compete against all teh cheap php coders and it's a waste of plone
talent.

I agree 100% with this. And I think we pitch it at a similar market to
you guys.

What I guess I really wanted to get some thoughts on in this thread
was the topic that Janus raised in his blog post and email... about
Plone consultancy company sizes versus other projects (such as
Umbraco). Does size matter? If so, why? Comparing Umbraco's 'certified
partner' list there is 15 companies listed, versus over 300 on
plone.net. Does the number of companies matter? Umbraco also have a
list of 'certified developers' who have undergone some kind of test
(10 multiple choice questions from a random pool). They have 150
developers listed there. We have 120 Plone Foundation members. I know
we've talked about certification and what it means many times before
in the Plone community, and I don't think we ever reached any kind of
decision.

So... does size matter?

-Matt

[ctxlken]

Matt,

Back during my 'objective CMS evaluation consulting' days with another
consulting firm, it was pretty common to have a 'short list' of
recommended CMS solutions to have clients evaluate. I, of course,
always tried to have Plone on that list, because usually the functional
requirements from clients large and small could be met by Plone, but in
those days, open source was only widely accepted at the infrastructure
layer (Linux for OS, maybe JBoss as application server), and it was a
tougher sell (to IT folks only, really) to pitch 'enterprise'
application solutions that were open source and/or that were based on
Python, a not-so-widely accepted 'enterprise' development language by IT.

The typical 'short lists' looked like this:

Enterprise CMS list:

Fatwire
Percussion Rhythmyx
Vignette (becoming OpenText)
Interwoven
Documentum (now EMC)
Stellent (acquired by Oracle)
BroadVision (wow, that's going back; only on list because we had a lot
of experience with the portal delivery side of BV)
RedDot (acquired by OpenText)
Plone (it couldn't hurt to get it more exposure and to show clients
that we were knowledgeable of solid FOSS options other consultancies
didn't even know of)


Windows/.NetShops CMS list:
RedDot (.Net for CMS, but Java-basd for portal delivery engine; Used
to be just a nice looking and easy-to-use CMS, but very feature-rich now.)
nCompass Labs (a really nice CMS that was purchased by M$ and became
'CMS 2002', which seemed to then get killed in favor of Sharepoint.
Amazing.)
Ektron (low-end cost .Net option, but also more limited functionality)
Plone (Realized Plone project wins after pitching it head-to-head
against the commercial tools)


Affordable/Open Source CMS List:
Ektron (especially attractive to Windows shops)
Plone
Typo3
ezPublish
Drupal
Joomla (for only very simple CMS requirements; basically to 'add pages')


Since Plone continued to beat out other open source tools when clients
had more demanding functional equirements, we eventually slimmed that
last list down to Ektron vs. Plone

Notice that Sharepoint wasn't even on our list at the time, as we saw it
strictly as more of a 'DMS' (Document Management System) that could be
used on Intranet projects. Later on, my company bought a Microsoft
integrator that provided Sharepoint services, so that became a bigger
part of our offering, but wasn't really part of the public-facing web
CMS (WCMS) list of options we came to the table with. It probably is
something my old company leads with now, though.


So, we had 'short lists' or recommended tools clients should consider
that were based upon client and expected budget size, but also that were
based upon these other criteria that I believe come into play:

Decision Maker - IT vs. Marketing:

If Marketing, we were more likely to get to propose/implement open
source/Plone because they just want a great, feature-rich 'solution' for
the best price, and don't care about whether it's written in Java or
.Net or whatever the standard skill set is of IT. Much of the time,
marketing wants to side-step IT and hire contractors and get support
from the CMS vendor anyhow.


Open Source Adoption Likelihood:

Again, if talking to Marketing/PR, this is less of an issue, but in
discussing options with IT, we would attempt to determine to what level
they might already be using open source, and how difficult a sell this
would be, not just for us, but for the internal group trying to get the
project approved (Marketing, Human Resources, etc.)


Magic Quadrant Effect:

If a client is starting off with, say the Gartner 'Magic Quadrant' ECM
Report or the Forrester 'Wave' Report (for which they've already paid
thousands), then they are less likely to have heard of open source CMS
tools (though this is slowly changing and we need to push for coverage
of Plone), and are focusing in on 'enterprise' type software and likely
have the corresponding budget size in mind as well.

See the Gartner Report
here:http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article3/article3.html

See an older Forrester Report here and notice coverage of Alfresco (open
source):
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/infrastructure/ocs/forrester-ecm-q42007.pdf

Some clients (especially IT managers) will only blindly follow these
reports. It's called 'managing risk-to-resume' and is akin to the old
addage that 'nobody ever got fired for buying solutions from IBM'. At
least that's an old addage in the Midwest U.S., where 'Big Blue' was
always king during the mainframe days. So, IT managers see risk in
going with solutions not in the 'magic quadrant' and if we perceived
that, we knew that recommending open source was going to be more
difficult unless we could really get the business department (marketing,
et al) to push hard for it.

Since this is the Plone Evangelism list, I think some things to take
aware are:

1) Research Coverage:

We should do what we can to contact Gartner, Forrester, Jupiter, and
other research firms to see what we can do to get Plone represented by
their research. What benchmarks do they use to determine which tools to
cover? Is Alfresco covered because it has a corporate face/backing to it?


2) Comparison Sheets:

We should provide comparison sheets that, rather than being general
enough to cover evaluations at the 'high end' and at the 'low end', are
targeted comparisons at each end, and in the middle. For a CMS
comparison of open source tools only, Idealware.org has already done
much of the work for us. Basically, indicating that all of the primary
open source CMS tools that make it to organizations' short lists are
viable, but that the more complex functionality a client needs, the more
they need Plone. A summary grid such as the one they present in their
report would be very nice to have for each targeted 'short list' we
would want to market. Of course, it's better when an objective third
party does it, but since Plone isn't getting much public coverage in
comparison to commercial tools, we may need to do some of this
ourselves. The CMSWatch.com reports DO cover commercial and open source
tools, so maybe the foundation should purchase a report (and others) and
then publish its own 'summary report' or something that doesn't conflict
with any report's license.

I have just this week been asked to come up with my own Ektron vs. Plone
comparison report for an IT integrator that knows Plone is a better fit
for their client than Ektron, but needs the specific criteria that
proves this. It's not the first time I've been asked for such a report
by someone who is a project champion and who wants to navigate around
questions about open source or python or whether it can run on
Windows/Linux or how to host it easily/affordably (without hiring a
Python or Linux expert), etc. It could help Plone integrators to have
such marketing answers/collateral.

The most commonly requested comparisons for our firm and that I think
would be most helpful are:

Plone vs. Drupal (I can now thankfully point clients to the
Idealware.org report that was produced by an objective party)
Plone vs. Sharepoint
Plone vs. Ektron


3) Client Testimonies:

Contact clients that we know chose Plone over other (commercial or open
source) CMS tools and ask them if they'd be willing to do an interview
or to fill out a survey that asks how they believe Plone vs. CMS X
compared in terms of various factors typical of normal evaluations.

It would also be really powerful to survey our past clients and provide
'average' numbers for small, medium, and large-sized projects, when
implemented with Plone integrators versus what clients were quoted
(ranges, not actual numbers) from commercial vendors. My experience
with the commercial vendors (outside of Ektron) is that a client is
typically looking at $250K on up just to get a 'Quick Start' package,
where the integrator implements one section of the website and includes
a week of training, so the client can have their own staff finish the
rest, or pay a lot more in fees to have it finished for them.


4) Cost Comparison Collateral:
It'd also be helpful to have an hourly rate schedule comparison of
'certified' commercial vendor integrators vs. Plone integrator firms
(leaving freelancers out of the equation so as not to compare apples and
oranges.)

I've been seeing topics for webinars from vendors such as IBM, Oracle,
and others similar to 'The Hidden Costs of Open Source' or 'Open Source
Doesn't Come Free'. Sure a Plone implementation is going to cost
something for the consulting time, but it'd be useful to have an overall
project costs comparison chart as well as an hourly consulting
comparison chart, because generally the commercial vendors are going to
charge $150-250/hr for services, while Plone services are typically
under even their low number and decision-makers need to see and consider
this.

This point is especially important as a decision-maker looks at the
3-year project cost. After implementation, a firm going with a
commercial solution is going to pay annual license fees and is going to
continue to pay higher hourly consulting fees, so the long-term costs
are even more drastically higher for a commercial system. Many
organizations are silly and only look at year-1 implementation costs and
let the following years' costs be ignored during the selection process.


5) Plone.net:

Add these surveys/interviews to the Case Studies section of Plone.net.
Or, possibly even better, once we have some of these, create a new
section on Plone.net called Client Testimonials that are interviews with
clients (especially focusing on the CMS evaluation/selection process)
rather than just project recaps that focus purely on what was done with
Plone was it was selected.


6) Plone Foundation Advertising via Google Ads:

Once we have client testimonials to point prospects/leads to, I'd
recommend having the Plone Foundation provide limited funding for some
Google Ads that would appear when people search for 'content management
systems', 'open source cms', 'plone', and similar terms. The ads could
have eye-catching teaser titles such as 'Why did NASA select the Plone
CMS?' There actually is a nice interview-style recap of the Plone
selection/implementation process from someone at NASA, by the way. I
recall Jon Stahl's blog or a tweet referring to it. Nice 3-part read.

If we could even get 3-4 such testimonials, I think it'd be a very
powerful and persuasive area for Plone.net and Plone would probably
benefit from teasers to this directly from the Plone.org home page.


I hope this wasn't just a walk down memory lane for me, and can help
provide some perspective for those on the list who have worked
exclusively with Plone in the CMS space.

Cheers,

Ken Wasetis
President and CMS Solution Architect
email: ***@contextualcorp.com
office: 847.356.3027
website: www.contextualcorp.com

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger consulting
companies?"
As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies are
*really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception thing. His
"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.
Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."
This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are some
larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and Sitecore,
but when that company needs to do something low end they are using
Umbraco.
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community? Are
there companies out there that say something like 'We normally use
Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.
-Matt
--
Matt Hamilton [hidden email]
<http://n2.nabble.com/user/SendEmail.jtp?type=node&node=3376803&i=0>
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk [phone]
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
[hidden email]
<http://n2.nabble.com/user/SendEmail.jtp?type=node&node=3376803&i=1>
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
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[Dylan Jay]

that's a tremendous amount of useful information. some very actionable
items.
Last conference there was a marketing sprint. Are you going to be there?
I'd like to be involved in a marketing sprint where work on completing
some of the tasks you outline such as creating comparisons sheets and
gathering testimonials and putting them on plone.org. It would be nice
to a concrete set of tasks to achieve before we hit the sprint (how?
anyone? come up with a list of tasks in this forum?) instead of the
sprint being about deciding on the list of tasks.
I also think it would be really good to encourage the business
development people from integrators into that sprint since a good deal
of their work is selling people on Plone, day in day out. Marketing
knowledge such as yours Ken, would also be fantastic.


---
Dylan Jay, Plone Solutions Manager
www.pretaweb.com
tel:[phone]
mob:[phone]
skype:dylan_jay

Post by ctxlken
Matt,
Back during my 'objective CMS evaluation consulting' days with another
consulting firm, it was pretty common to have a 'short list' of
recommended CMS solutions to have clients evaluate. I, of course,
always tried to have Plone on that list, because usually the
functional
requirements from clients large and small could be met by Plone, but in
those days, open source was only widely accepted at the infrastructure
layer (Linux for OS, maybe JBoss as application server), and it was a
tougher sell (to IT folks only, really) to pitch 'enterprise'
application solutions that were open source and/or that were based on
Python, a not-so-widely accepted 'enterprise' development language by IT.
Fatwire
Percussion Rhythmyx
Vignette (becoming OpenText)
Interwoven
Documentum (now EMC)
Stellent (acquired by Oracle)
BroadVision (wow, that's going back; only on list because we had a lot
of experience with the portal delivery side of BV)
RedDot (acquired by OpenText)
Plone (it couldn't hurt to get it more exposure and to show clients
that we were knowledgeable of solid FOSS options other consultancies
didn't even know of)
RedDot (.Net for CMS, but Java-basd for portal delivery engine; Used
to be just a nice looking and easy-to-use CMS, but very feature-rich now.)
nCompass Labs (a really nice CMS that was purchased by M$ and became
'CMS 2002', which seemed to then get killed in favor of Sharepoint.
Amazing.)
Ektron (low-end cost .Net option, but also more limited
functionality)
Plone (Realized Plone project wins after pitching it head-to-head
against the commercial tools)
Ektron (especially attractive to Windows shops)
Plone
Typo3
ezPublish
Drupal
Joomla (for only very simple CMS requirements; basically to 'add pages')
Since Plone continued to beat out other open source tools when clients
had more demanding functional equirements, we eventually slimmed that
last list down to Ektron vs. Plone
Notice that Sharepoint wasn't even on our list at the time, as we saw it
strictly as more of a 'DMS' (Document Management System) that could be
used on Intranet projects. Later on, my company bought a Microsoft
integrator that provided Sharepoint services, so that became a bigger
part of our offering, but wasn't really part of the public-facing web
CMS (WCMS) list of options we came to the table with. It probably is
something my old company leads with now, though.
So, we had 'short lists' or recommended tools clients should consider
that were based upon client and expected budget size, but also that were
If Marketing, we were more likely to get to propose/implement open
source/Plone because they just want a great, feature-rich 'solution' for
the best price, and don't care about whether it's written in Java or
.Net or whatever the standard skill set is of IT. Much of the time,
marketing wants to side-step IT and hire contractors and get support
from the CMS vendor anyhow.
Again, if talking to Marketing/PR, this is less of an issue, but in
discussing options with IT, we would attempt to determine to what level
they might already be using open source, and how difficult a sell this
would be, not just for us, but for the internal group trying to get the
project approved (Marketing, Human Resources, etc.)
If a client is starting off with, say the Gartner 'Magic Quadrant' ECM
Report or the Forrester 'Wave' Report (for which they've already paid
thousands), then they are less likely to have heard of open source CMS
tools (though this is slowly changing and we need to push for coverage
of Plone), and are focusing in on 'enterprise' type software and likely
have the corresponding budget size in mind as well.
See the Gartner Report
here:http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article3/article3.html
See an older Forrester Report here and notice coverage of Alfresco (open
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/infrastructure/ocs/forrester-ecm-q42007.pdf
Some clients (especially IT managers) will only blindly follow these
reports. It's called 'managing risk-to-resume' and is akin to the old
addage that 'nobody ever got fired for buying solutions from IBM'. At
least that's an old addage in the Midwest U.S., where 'Big Blue' was
always king during the mainframe days. So, IT managers see risk in
going with solutions not in the 'magic quadrant' and if we perceived
that, we knew that recommending open source was going to be more
difficult unless we could really get the business department
(marketing,
et al) to push hard for it.
Since this is the Plone Evangelism list, I think some things to take
We should do what we can to contact Gartner, Forrester, Jupiter, and
other research firms to see what we can do to get Plone represented by
their research. What benchmarks do they use to determine which tools to
cover? Is Alfresco covered because it has a corporate face/backing to it?
We should provide comparison sheets that, rather than being general
enough to cover evaluations at the 'high end' and at the 'low end', are
targeted comparisons at each end, and in the middle. For a CMS
comparison of open source tools only, Idealware.org has already done
much of the work for us. Basically, indicating that all of the primary
open source CMS tools that make it to organizations' short lists are
viable, but that the more complex functionality a client needs, the more
they need Plone. A summary grid such as the one they present in their
report would be very nice to have for each targeted 'short list' we
would want to market. Of course, it's better when an objective third
party does it, but since Plone isn't getting much public coverage in
comparison to commercial tools, we may need to do some of this
ourselves. The CMSWatch.com reports DO cover commercial and open source
tools, so maybe the foundation should purchase a report (and others) and
then publish its own 'summary report' or something that doesn't conflict
with any report's license.
I have just this week been asked to come up with my own Ektron vs. Plone
comparison report for an IT integrator that knows Plone is a better fit
for their client than Ektron, but needs the specific criteria that
proves this. It's not the first time I've been asked for such a report
by someone who is a project champion and who wants to navigate around
questions about open source or python or whether it can run on
Windows/Linux or how to host it easily/affordably (without hiring a
Python or Linux expert), etc. It could help Plone integrators to have
such marketing answers/collateral.
The most commonly requested comparisons for our firm and that I think
Plone vs. Drupal (I can now thankfully point clients to the
Idealware.org report that was produced by an objective party)
Plone vs. Sharepoint
Plone vs. Ektron
Contact clients that we know chose Plone over other (commercial or open
source) CMS tools and ask them if they'd be willing to do an interview
or to fill out a survey that asks how they believe Plone vs. CMS X
compared in terms of various factors typical of normal evaluations.
It would also be really powerful to survey our past clients and provide
'average' numbers for small, medium, and large-sized projects, when
implemented with Plone integrators versus what clients were quoted
(ranges, not actual numbers) from commercial vendors. My experience
with the commercial vendors (outside of Ektron) is that a client is
typically looking at $250K on up just to get a 'Quick Start' package,
where the integrator implements one section of the website and
includes
a week of training, so the client can have their own staff finish the
rest, or pay a lot more in fees to have it finished for them.
It'd also be helpful to have an hourly rate schedule comparison of
'certified' commercial vendor integrators vs. Plone integrator firms
(leaving freelancers out of the equation so as not to compare apples and
oranges.)
I've been seeing topics for webinars from vendors such as IBM, Oracle,
and others similar to 'The Hidden Costs of Open Source' or 'Open Source
Doesn't Come Free'. Sure a Plone implementation is going to cost
something for the consulting time, but it'd be useful to have an overall
project costs comparison chart as well as an hourly consulting
comparison chart, because generally the commercial vendors are going to
charge $150-250/hr for services, while Plone services are typically
under even their low number and decision-makers need to see and consider
this.
This point is especially important as a decision-maker looks at the
3-year project cost. After implementation, a firm going with a
commercial solution is going to pay annual license fees and is going to
continue to pay higher hourly consulting fees, so the long-term costs
are even more drastically higher for a commercial system. Many
organizations are silly and only look at year-1 implementation costs and
let the following years' costs be ignored during the selection
process.
Add these surveys/interviews to the Case Studies section of Plone.net.
Or, possibly even better, once we have some of these, create a new
section on Plone.net called Client Testimonials that are interviews with
clients (especially focusing on the CMS evaluation/selection process)
rather than just project recaps that focus purely on what was done with
Plone was it was selected.
Once we have client testimonials to point prospects/leads to, I'd
recommend having the Plone Foundation provide limited funding for some
Google Ads that would appear when people search for 'content
management
systems', 'open source cms', 'plone', and similar terms. The ads could
have eye-catching teaser titles such as 'Why did NASA select the Plone
CMS?' There actually is a nice interview-style recap of the Plone
selection/implementation process from someone at NASA, by the way. I
recall Jon Stahl's blog or a tweet referring to it. Nice 3-part read.
If we could even get 3-4 such testimonials, I think it'd be a very
powerful and persuasive area for Plone.net and Plone would probably
benefit from teasers to this directly from the Plone.org home page.
I hope this wasn't just a walk down memory lane for me, and can help
provide some perspective for those on the list who have worked
exclusively with Plone in the CMS space.
Cheers,
Ken Wasetis
President and CMS Solution Architect
office: 847.356.3027
website: www.contextualcorp.com

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger
consulting
companies?"
As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies are
*really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception thing. His
"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end
alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.
Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."
This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are some
larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and
Sitecore,
but when that company needs to do something low end they are using
Umbraco.
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community? Are
there companies out there that say something like 'We normally use
Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.
-Matt
--
Matt Hamilton [hidden email]
<http://n2.nabble.com/user/SendEmail.jtp?type=node&node=3376803&i=0>
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk [phone]
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
[hidden email]
<http://n2.nabble.com/user/SendEmail.jtp?type=node&node=3376803&i=1>
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
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To unsubscribe from Evangelism, click here
< (link removed) =>.

--
View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/Article%3A-Is-Plone-a-Good-CMS-tp3300458p3378978.html
Sent from the Evangelism mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism

[Takeshi Yamamoto]

This page could be helpful to make a comparison sheet.

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

Click the check boxes of Plone and few more CMS, then press Compare
button.

Takeshi

Post by Dylan Jay
that's a tremendous amount of useful information. some very
actionable items.
Last conference there was a marketing sprint. Are you going to be there?
I'd like to be involved in a marketing sprint where work on
completing some of the tasks you outline such as creating
comparisons sheets and gathering testimonials and putting them on
plone.org. It would be nice to a concrete set of tasks to achieve
before we hit the sprint (how? anyone? come up with a list of tasks
in this forum?) instead of the sprint being about deciding on the
list of tasks.
I also think it would be really good to encourage the business
development people from integrators into that sprint since a good
deal of their work is selling people on Plone, day in day out.
Marketing knowledge such as yours Ken, would also be fantastic.
---
Dylan Jay, Plone Solutions Manager
www.pretaweb.com
tel:[phone]
mob:[phone]
skype:dylan_jay

Post by ctxlken
Matt,
Back during my 'objective CMS evaluation consulting' days with another
consulting firm, it was pretty common to have a 'short list' of
recommended CMS solutions to have clients evaluate. I, of course,
always tried to have Plone on that list, because usually the
functional
requirements from clients large and small could be met by Plone, but in
those days, open source was only widely accepted at the
infrastructure
layer (Linux for OS, maybe JBoss as application server), and it was a
tougher sell (to IT folks only, really) to pitch 'enterprise'
application solutions that were open source and/or that were based on
Python, a not-so-widely accepted 'enterprise' development language by IT.
Fatwire
Percussion Rhythmyx
Vignette (becoming OpenText)
Interwoven
Documentum (now EMC)
Stellent (acquired by Oracle)
BroadVision (wow, that's going back; only on list because we had a lot
of experience with the portal delivery side of BV)
RedDot (acquired by OpenText)
Plone (it couldn't hurt to get it more exposure and to show clients
that we were knowledgeable of solid FOSS options other consultancies
didn't even know of)
RedDot (.Net for CMS, but Java-basd for portal delivery engine; Used
to be just a nice looking and easy-to-use CMS, but very feature-
rich now.)
nCompass Labs (a really nice CMS that was purchased by M$ and became
'CMS 2002', which seemed to then get killed in favor of Sharepoint.
Amazing.)
Ektron (low-end cost .Net option, but also more limited
functionality)
Plone (Realized Plone project wins after pitching it head-to-head
against the commercial tools)
Ektron (especially attractive to Windows shops)
Plone
Typo3
ezPublish
Drupal
Joomla (for only very simple CMS requirements; basically to 'add pages')
Since Plone continued to beat out other open source tools when clients
had more demanding functional equirements, we eventually slimmed that
last list down to Ektron vs. Plone
Notice that Sharepoint wasn't even on our list at the time, as we saw it
strictly as more of a 'DMS' (Document Management System) that could be
used on Intranet projects. Later on, my company bought a Microsoft
integrator that provided Sharepoint services, so that became a bigger
part of our offering, but wasn't really part of the public-facing web
CMS (WCMS) list of options we came to the table with. It probably is
something my old company leads with now, though.
So, we had 'short lists' or recommended tools clients should consider
that were based upon client and expected budget size, but also that were
If Marketing, we were more likely to get to propose/implement open
source/Plone because they just want a great, feature-rich
'solution' for
the best price, and don't care about whether it's written in Java or
.Net or whatever the standard skill set is of IT. Much of the time,
marketing wants to side-step IT and hire contractors and get support
from the CMS vendor anyhow.
Again, if talking to Marketing/PR, this is less of an issue, but in
discussing options with IT, we would attempt to determine to what level
they might already be using open source, and how difficult a sell this
would be, not just for us, but for the internal group trying to get the
project approved (Marketing, Human Resources, etc.)
If a client is starting off with, say the Gartner 'Magic Quadrant' ECM
Report or the Forrester 'Wave' Report (for which they've already paid
thousands), then they are less likely to have heard of open source CMS
tools (though this is slowly changing and we need to push for
coverage
of Plone), and are focusing in on 'enterprise' type software and likely
have the corresponding budget size in mind as well.
See the Gartner Report
here:http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article3/article3.html
See an older Forrester Report here and notice coverage of Alfresco (open
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/infrastructure/ocs/forrester-ecm-q42007.pdf
Some clients (especially IT managers) will only blindly follow these
reports. It's called 'managing risk-to-resume' and is akin to the old
addage that 'nobody ever got fired for buying solutions from IBM'.
At
least that's an old addage in the Midwest U.S., where 'Big Blue' was
always king during the mainframe days. So, IT managers see risk in
going with solutions not in the 'magic quadrant' and if we perceived
that, we knew that recommending open source was going to be more
difficult unless we could really get the business department
(marketing,
et al) to push hard for it.
Since this is the Plone Evangelism list, I think some things to take
We should do what we can to contact Gartner, Forrester, Jupiter, and
other research firms to see what we can do to get Plone represented by
their research. What benchmarks do they use to determine which tools to
cover? Is Alfresco covered because it has a corporate face/backing to it?
We should provide comparison sheets that, rather than being general
enough to cover evaluations at the 'high end' and at the 'low end', are
targeted comparisons at each end, and in the middle. For a CMS
comparison of open source tools only, Idealware.org has already done
much of the work for us. Basically, indicating that all of the primary
open source CMS tools that make it to organizations' short lists are
viable, but that the more complex functionality a client needs, the more
they need Plone. A summary grid such as the one they present in their
report would be very nice to have for each targeted 'short list' we
would want to market. Of course, it's better when an objective third
party does it, but since Plone isn't getting much public coverage in
comparison to commercial tools, we may need to do some of this
ourselves. The CMSWatch.com reports DO cover commercial and open source
tools, so maybe the foundation should purchase a report (and
others) and
then publish its own 'summary report' or something that doesn't conflict
with any report's license.
I have just this week been asked to come up with my own Ektron vs. Plone
comparison report for an IT integrator that knows Plone is a better fit
for their client than Ektron, but needs the specific criteria that
proves this. It's not the first time I've been asked for such a report
by someone who is a project champion and who wants to navigate around
questions about open source or python or whether it can run on
Windows/Linux or how to host it easily/affordably (without hiring a
Python or Linux expert), etc. It could help Plone integrators to have
such marketing answers/collateral.
The most commonly requested comparisons for our firm and that I think
Plone vs. Drupal (I can now thankfully point clients to the
Idealware.org report that was produced by an objective party)
Plone vs. Sharepoint
Plone vs. Ektron
Contact clients that we know chose Plone over other (commercial or open
source) CMS tools and ask them if they'd be willing to do an
interview
or to fill out a survey that asks how they believe Plone vs. CMS X
compared in terms of various factors typical of normal evaluations.
It would also be really powerful to survey our past clients and provide
'average' numbers for small, medium, and large-sized projects, when
implemented with Plone integrators versus what clients were quoted
(ranges, not actual numbers) from commercial vendors. My experience
with the commercial vendors (outside of Ektron) is that a client is
typically looking at $250K on up just to get a 'Quick Start' package,
where the integrator implements one section of the website and includes
a week of training, so the client can have their own staff finish the
rest, or pay a lot more in fees to have it finished for them.
It'd also be helpful to have an hourly rate schedule comparison of
'certified' commercial vendor integrators vs. Plone integrator firms
(leaving freelancers out of the equation so as not to compare
apples and
oranges.)
I've been seeing topics for webinars from vendors such as IBM, Oracle,
and others similar to 'The Hidden Costs of Open Source' or 'Open Source
Doesn't Come Free'. Sure a Plone implementation is going to cost
something for the consulting time, but it'd be useful to have an overall
project costs comparison chart as well as an hourly consulting
comparison chart, because generally the commercial vendors are going to
charge $150-250/hr for services, while Plone services are typically
under even their low number and decision-makers need to see and consider
this.
This point is especially important as a decision-maker looks at the
3-year project cost. After implementation, a firm going with a
commercial solution is going to pay annual license fees and is going to
continue to pay higher hourly consulting fees, so the long-term costs
are even more drastically higher for a commercial system. Many
organizations are silly and only look at year-1 implementation costs and
let the following years' costs be ignored during the selection process.
Add these surveys/interviews to the Case Studies section of
Plone.net.
Or, possibly even better, once we have some of these, create a new
section on Plone.net called Client Testimonials that are interviews with
clients (especially focusing on the CMS evaluation/selection process)
rather than just project recaps that focus purely on what was done with
Plone was it was selected.
Once we have client testimonials to point prospects/leads to, I'd
recommend having the Plone Foundation provide limited funding for some
Google Ads that would appear when people search for 'content
management
systems', 'open source cms', 'plone', and similar terms. The ads could
have eye-catching teaser titles such as 'Why did NASA select the Plone
CMS?' There actually is a nice interview-style recap of the Plone
selection/implementation process from someone at NASA, by the way. I
recall Jon Stahl's blog or a tweet referring to it. Nice 3-part read.
If we could even get 3-4 such testimonials, I think it'd be a very
powerful and persuasive area for Plone.net and Plone would probably
benefit from teasers to this directly from the Plone.org home page.
I hope this wasn't just a walk down memory lane for me, and can help
provide some perspective for those on the list who have worked
exclusively with Plone in the CMS space.
Cheers,
Ken Wasetis
President and CMS Solution Architect
office: 847.356.3027
website: www.contextualcorp.com

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger
consulting
companies?"
As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies are
*really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception thing. His
"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end
alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.
Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."
This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are some
larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and
Sitecore,
but when that company needs to do something low end they are using
Umbraco.
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community? Are
there companies out there that say something like 'We normally use
Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.
-Matt
--
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[Matt Hamilton]

Post by Takeshi Yamamoto
This page could be helpful to make a comparison sheet.
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
Click the check boxes of Plone and few more CMS, then press Compare
button.

Anyone know who is the account holder for this site? The info is quite
out of date now and needs updating (maybe wait until 3.3 release then
update it).

-Matt

[Karl Horak]

Back in January Geir Baekholt contacted me about taking over the Plone
listing at CMSMatrix from him. I've never been able to figure out what the
process is for changing the responsible party, so it's still stuck in limbo.

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Takeshi Yamamoto
This page could be helpful to make a comparison sheet.
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
Click the check boxes of Plone and few more CMS, then press Compare
button.

Anyone know who is the account holder for this site? The info is quite
out of date now and needs updating (maybe wait until 3.3 release then
update it).
-Matt
--
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk [phone]
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism

[Karl Horak]

Back in January Geir Baekholt contacted me about taking over the Plone
listing at CMSMatrix from him. I've never been able to figure out what the
process is for changing the responsible party, so it's still stuck in limbo.

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Takeshi Yamamoto
This page could be helpful to make a comparison sheet.
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
Click the check boxes of Plone and few more CMS, then press Compare
button.

Anyone know who is the account holder for this site? The info is quite
out of date now and needs updating (maybe wait until 3.3 release then
update it).
-Matt
--
Matt Hamilton matth at netsight.co.uk
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk [phone]
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
Evangelism at lists.plone.org
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism

[Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]]

Takeshi,

Thanks - I know that this site has been around for years and hadn't
checked it out in a little bit. I see that they now have some coverage
of commercial tools.

I still have many issues with this site and the way that it compares
apples and oranges. For instance, it just lumps portal/delivery engines
with CMS tools. The characteristics being measured appear more geared
toward a web development framework than a CMS. There's no measurement
for workflow or level of complexity of workflow supported, no mention of
'structured content types/model', or fine-grained permission management
(only authentication mechanisms supported, such as Kerberos vs. NTLM, etc.)

We have had numerous clients mention that this is where they started
before contacting us, though, so we need to be sure to keep this site
updated with each Plone release as much as possible. I know that I've
emailed the site administrator in the past when I thought some things
were out-of-date on the Plone details.

I don't like that there is no key or glossary to help determine what is
actually being measured by a certain measurement. Some are quite
ambiguous, for example the 'Matrix' yes/no characteristic - what the
heck is that?

One characteristic that I would take issue with on the Plone measurement
side is that of 'front-end web services'. Zope (and therefore Plone)
has support for XML-RPC out of the box and has had this earlier than any
other known application server. Perhaps what they really mean to
measure is support for the SOAP specification in particular.

Anyhow, you can see how such a matrix can either be misleading, not give
full context or details of what's being measured, and can give false
impressions. But it is 'something' and it is a site that clients and
prospective clients sometimes use, like it or not.

Perhaps we can push for a more CMS-focused section within the comparison
list. Something that reviews more CMS-related features such as which
WYSIWYGs are supported, complexity of workflow supported (event or
activity-basd, serial only, voting pass/fail with quorum/threshold for
pass, number of roles/transitions/states supported), permission
management/sharing of site/folders/pages/fields, integration of taxonomy
management, etc.

I'd also recommend we push for measuring the number of security-related
patches released per year (as documented by objective sites, not vendors.)

These are things that will help Plone shine in comparison to other
tools, but also happen to be things that are generally accepted to be
evaluation characteristics of CMS tools, not just portals or web
publishing tools (such as Wordpress or phpNuke, etc.)


Thanks for reminding us of the matrix site. It's important that we get
good representation there.

Ken

Post by Takeshi Yamamoto
This page could be helpful to make a comparison sheet.
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
Click the check boxes of Plone and few more CMS, then press Compare
button.
Takeshi

Post by Dylan Jay
that's a tremendous amount of useful information. some very
actionable items.
Last conference there was a marketing sprint. Are you going to be there?
I'd like to be involved in a marketing sprint where work on
completing some of the tasks you outline such as creating comparisons
sheets and gathering testimonials and putting them on plone.org. It
would be nice to a concrete set of tasks to achieve before we hit the
sprint (how? anyone? come up with a list of tasks in this forum?)
instead of the sprint being about deciding on the list of tasks.
I also think it would be really good to encourage the business
development people from integrators into that sprint since a good
deal of their work is selling people on Plone, day in day out.
Marketing knowledge such as yours Ken, would also be fantastic.
---
Dylan Jay, Plone Solutions Manager
www.pretaweb.com
tel:[phone]
mob:[phone]
skype:dylan_jay

Post by ctxlken
Matt,
Back during my 'objective CMS evaluation consulting' days with another
consulting firm, it was pretty common to have a 'short list' of
recommended CMS solutions to have clients evaluate. I, of course,
always tried to have Plone on that list, because usually the functional
requirements from clients large and small could be met by Plone, but in
those days, open source was only widely accepted at the infrastructure
layer (Linux for OS, maybe JBoss as application server), and it was a
tougher sell (to IT folks only, really) to pitch 'enterprise'
application solutions that were open source and/or that were based on
Python, a not-so-widely accepted 'enterprise' development language by IT.
Fatwire
Percussion Rhythmyx
Vignette (becoming OpenText)
Interwoven
Documentum (now EMC)
Stellent (acquired by Oracle)
BroadVision (wow, that's going back; only on list because we had a lot
of experience with the portal delivery side of BV)
RedDot (acquired by OpenText)
Plone (it couldn't hurt to get it more exposure and to show clients
that we were knowledgeable of solid FOSS options other consultancies
didn't even know of)
RedDot (.Net for CMS, but Java-basd for portal delivery engine; Used
to be just a nice looking and easy-to-use CMS, but very feature-rich now.)
nCompass Labs (a really nice CMS that was purchased by M$ and became
'CMS 2002', which seemed to then get killed in favor of Sharepoint.
Amazing.)
Ektron (low-end cost .Net option, but also more limited functionality)
Plone (Realized Plone project wins after pitching it head-to-head
against the commercial tools)
Ektron (especially attractive to Windows shops)
Plone
Typo3
ezPublish
Drupal
Joomla (for only very simple CMS requirements; basically to 'add pages')
Since Plone continued to beat out other open source tools when clients
had more demanding functional equirements, we eventually slimmed that
last list down to Ektron vs. Plone
Notice that Sharepoint wasn't even on our list at the time, as we saw it
strictly as more of a 'DMS' (Document Management System) that could be
used on Intranet projects. Later on, my company bought a Microsoft
integrator that provided Sharepoint services, so that became a bigger
part of our offering, but wasn't really part of the public-facing web
CMS (WCMS) list of options we came to the table with. It probably is
something my old company leads with now, though.
So, we had 'short lists' or recommended tools clients should consider
that were based upon client and expected budget size, but also that were
If Marketing, we were more likely to get to propose/implement open
source/Plone because they just want a great, feature-rich 'solution' for
the best price, and don't care about whether it's written in Java or
.Net or whatever the standard skill set is of IT. Much of the time,
marketing wants to side-step IT and hire contractors and get support
from the CMS vendor anyhow.
Again, if talking to Marketing/PR, this is less of an issue, but in
discussing options with IT, we would attempt to determine to what level
they might already be using open source, and how difficult a sell this
would be, not just for us, but for the internal group trying to get the
project approved (Marketing, Human Resources, etc.)
If a client is starting off with, say the Gartner 'Magic Quadrant' ECM
Report or the Forrester 'Wave' Report (for which they've already paid
thousands), then they are less likely to have heard of open source CMS
tools (though this is slowly changing and we need to push for coverage
of Plone), and are focusing in on 'enterprise' type software and likely
have the corresponding budget size in mind as well.
See the Gartner Report
here:http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article3/article3.html
See an older Forrester Report here and notice coverage of Alfresco (open
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/infrastructure/ocs/forrester-ecm-q42007.pdf
Some clients (especially IT managers) will only blindly follow these
reports. It's called 'managing risk-to-resume' and is akin to the old
addage that 'nobody ever got fired for buying solutions from IBM'. At
least that's an old addage in the Midwest U.S., where 'Big Blue' was
always king during the mainframe days. So, IT managers see risk in
going with solutions not in the 'magic quadrant' and if we perceived
that, we knew that recommending open source was going to be more
difficult unless we could really get the business department
(marketing,
et al) to push hard for it.
Since this is the Plone Evangelism list, I think some things to take
We should do what we can to contact Gartner, Forrester, Jupiter, and
other research firms to see what we can do to get Plone represented by
their research. What benchmarks do they use to determine which tools to
cover? Is Alfresco covered because it has a corporate face/backing to it?
We should provide comparison sheets that, rather than being general
enough to cover evaluations at the 'high end' and at the 'low end', are
targeted comparisons at each end, and in the middle. For a CMS
comparison of open source tools only, Idealware.org has already done
much of the work for us. Basically, indicating that all of the primary
open source CMS tools that make it to organizations' short lists are
viable, but that the more complex functionality a client needs, the more
they need Plone. A summary grid such as the one they present in their
report would be very nice to have for each targeted 'short list' we
would want to market. Of course, it's better when an objective third
party does it, but since Plone isn't getting much public coverage in
comparison to commercial tools, we may need to do some of this
ourselves. The CMSWatch.com reports DO cover commercial and open source
tools, so maybe the foundation should purchase a report (and others) and
then publish its own 'summary report' or something that doesn't conflict
with any report's license.
I have just this week been asked to come up with my own Ektron vs. Plone
comparison report for an IT integrator that knows Plone is a better fit
for their client than Ektron, but needs the specific criteria that
proves this. It's not the first time I've been asked for such a report
by someone who is a project champion and who wants to navigate around
questions about open source or python or whether it can run on
Windows/Linux or how to host it easily/affordably (without hiring a
Python or Linux expert), etc. It could help Plone integrators to have
such marketing answers/collateral.
The most commonly requested comparisons for our firm and that I think
Plone vs. Drupal (I can now thankfully point clients to the
Idealware.org report that was produced by an objective party)
Plone vs. Sharepoint
Plone vs. Ektron
Contact clients that we know chose Plone over other (commercial or open
source) CMS tools and ask them if they'd be willing to do an interview
or to fill out a survey that asks how they believe Plone vs. CMS X
compared in terms of various factors typical of normal evaluations.
It would also be really powerful to survey our past clients and provide
'average' numbers for small, medium, and large-sized projects, when
implemented with Plone integrators versus what clients were quoted
(ranges, not actual numbers) from commercial vendors. My experience
with the commercial vendors (outside of Ektron) is that a client is
typically looking at $250K on up just to get a 'Quick Start' package,
where the integrator implements one section of the website and includes
a week of training, so the client can have their own staff finish the
rest, or pay a lot more in fees to have it finished for them.
It'd also be helpful to have an hourly rate schedule comparison of
'certified' commercial vendor integrators vs. Plone integrator firms
(leaving freelancers out of the equation so as not to compare apples and
oranges.)
I've been seeing topics for webinars from vendors such as IBM, Oracle,
and others similar to 'The Hidden Costs of Open Source' or 'Open Source
Doesn't Come Free'. Sure a Plone implementation is going to cost
something for the consulting time, but it'd be useful to have an overall
project costs comparison chart as well as an hourly consulting
comparison chart, because generally the commercial vendors are going to
charge $150-250/hr for services, while Plone services are typically
under even their low number and decision-makers need to see and consider
this.
This point is especially important as a decision-maker looks at the
3-year project cost. After implementation, a firm going with a
commercial solution is going to pay annual license fees and is going to
continue to pay higher hourly consulting fees, so the long-term costs
are even more drastically higher for a commercial system. Many
organizations are silly and only look at year-1 implementation costs and
let the following years' costs be ignored during the selection process.
Add these surveys/interviews to the Case Studies section of Plone.net.
Or, possibly even better, once we have some of these, create a new
section on Plone.net called Client Testimonials that are interviews with
clients (especially focusing on the CMS evaluation/selection process)
rather than just project recaps that focus purely on what was done with
Plone was it was selected.
Once we have client testimonials to point prospects/leads to, I'd
recommend having the Plone Foundation provide limited funding for some
Google Ads that would appear when people search for 'content management
systems', 'open source cms', 'plone', and similar terms. The ads could
have eye-catching teaser titles such as 'Why did NASA select the Plone
CMS?' There actually is a nice interview-style recap of the Plone
selection/implementation process from someone at NASA, by the way. I
recall Jon Stahl's blog or a tweet referring to it. Nice 3-part read.
If we could even get 3-4 such testimonials, I think it'd be a very
powerful and persuasive area for Plone.net and Plone would probably
benefit from teasers to this directly from the Plone.org home page.
I hope this wasn't just a walk down memory lane for me, and can help
provide some perspective for those on the list who have worked
exclusively with Plone in the CMS space.
Cheers,
Ken Wasetis
President and CMS Solution Architect
office: 847.356.3027
website: www.contextualcorp.com

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger consulting
companies?"
As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies are
*really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception thing. His
"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end
alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.
Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."
This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are some
larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and Sitecore,
but when that company needs to do something low end they are using
Umbraco.
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community? Are
there companies out there that say something like 'We normally use
Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.
-Matt
--
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<http://n2.nabble.com/user/SendEmail.jtp?type=node&node=3376803&i=0>
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk [phone]
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
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[Matt Hamilton]

Post by Takeshi Yamamoto
This page could be helpful to make a comparison sheet.
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
Click the check boxes of Plone and few more CMS, then press Compare
button.

Anyone know who is the account holder for this site? The info is quite
out of date now and needs updating (maybe wait until 3.3 release then
update it).

-Matt

[Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]]

Takeshi,

Thanks - I know that this site has been around for years and hadn't
checked it out in a little bit. I see that they now have some coverage
of commercial tools.

I still have many issues with this site and the way that it compares
apples and oranges. For instance, it just lumps portal/delivery engines
with CMS tools. The characteristics being measured appear more geared
toward a web development framework than a CMS. There's no measurement
for workflow or level of complexity of workflow supported, no mention of
'structured content types/model', or fine-grained permission management
(only authentication mechanisms supported, such as Kerberos vs. NTLM, etc.)

We have had numerous clients mention that this is where they started
before contacting us, though, so we need to be sure to keep this site
updated with each Plone release as much as possible. I know that I've
emailed the site administrator in the past when I thought some things
were out-of-date on the Plone details.

I don't like that there is no key or glossary to help determine what is
actually being measured by a certain measurement. Some are quite
ambiguous, for example the 'Matrix' yes/no characteristic - what the
heck is that?

One characteristic that I would take issue with on the Plone measurement
side is that of 'front-end web services'. Zope (and therefore Plone)
has support for XML-RPC out of the box and has had this earlier than any
other known application server. Perhaps what they really mean to
measure is support for the SOAP specification in particular.

Anyhow, you can see how such a matrix can either be misleading, not give
full context or details of what's being measured, and can give false
impressions. But it is 'something' and it is a site that clients and
prospective clients sometimes use, like it or not.

Perhaps we can push for a more CMS-focused section within the comparison
list. Something that reviews more CMS-related features such as which
WYSIWYGs are supported, complexity of workflow supported (event or
activity-basd, serial only, voting pass/fail with quorum/threshold for
pass, number of roles/transitions/states supported), permission
management/sharing of site/folders/pages/fields, integration of taxonomy
management, etc.

I'd also recommend we push for measuring the number of security-related
patches released per year (as documented by objective sites, not vendors.)

These are things that will help Plone shine in comparison to other
tools, but also happen to be things that are generally accepted to be
evaluation characteristics of CMS tools, not just portals or web
publishing tools (such as Wordpress or phpNuke, etc.)


Thanks for reminding us of the matrix site. It's important that we get
good representation there.

Ken

Post by Takeshi Yamamoto
This page could be helpful to make a comparison sheet.
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
Click the check boxes of Plone and few more CMS, then press Compare
button.
Takeshi

Post by Dylan Jay
that's a tremendous amount of useful information. some very
actionable items.
Last conference there was a marketing sprint. Are you going to be there?
I'd like to be involved in a marketing sprint where work on
completing some of the tasks you outline such as creating comparisons
sheets and gathering testimonials and putting them on plone.org. It
would be nice to a concrete set of tasks to achieve before we hit the
sprint (how? anyone? come up with a list of tasks in this forum?)
instead of the sprint being about deciding on the list of tasks.
I also think it would be really good to encourage the business
development people from integrators into that sprint since a good
deal of their work is selling people on Plone, day in day out.
Marketing knowledge such as yours Ken, would also be fantastic.
---
Dylan Jay, Plone Solutions Manager
www.pretaweb.com
tel:[phone]
mob:[phone]
skype:dylan_jay

Post by ctxlken
Matt,
Back during my 'objective CMS evaluation consulting' days with another
consulting firm, it was pretty common to have a 'short list' of
recommended CMS solutions to have clients evaluate. I, of course,
always tried to have Plone on that list, because usually the functional
requirements from clients large and small could be met by Plone, but in
those days, open source was only widely accepted at the infrastructure
layer (Linux for OS, maybe JBoss as application server), and it was a
tougher sell (to IT folks only, really) to pitch 'enterprise'
application solutions that were open source and/or that were based on
Python, a not-so-widely accepted 'enterprise' development language by IT.
Fatwire
Percussion Rhythmyx
Vignette (becoming OpenText)
Interwoven
Documentum (now EMC)
Stellent (acquired by Oracle)
BroadVision (wow, that's going back; only on list because we had a lot
of experience with the portal delivery side of BV)
RedDot (acquired by OpenText)
Plone (it couldn't hurt to get it more exposure and to show clients
that we were knowledgeable of solid FOSS options other consultancies
didn't even know of)
RedDot (.Net for CMS, but Java-basd for portal delivery engine; Used
to be just a nice looking and easy-to-use CMS, but very feature-rich now.)
nCompass Labs (a really nice CMS that was purchased by M$ and became
'CMS 2002', which seemed to then get killed in favor of Sharepoint.
Amazing.)
Ektron (low-end cost .Net option, but also more limited functionality)
Plone (Realized Plone project wins after pitching it head-to-head
against the commercial tools)
Ektron (especially attractive to Windows shops)
Plone
Typo3
ezPublish
Drupal
Joomla (for only very simple CMS requirements; basically to 'add pages')
Since Plone continued to beat out other open source tools when clients
had more demanding functional equirements, we eventually slimmed that
last list down to Ektron vs. Plone
Notice that Sharepoint wasn't even on our list at the time, as we saw it
strictly as more of a 'DMS' (Document Management System) that could be
used on Intranet projects. Later on, my company bought a Microsoft
integrator that provided Sharepoint services, so that became a bigger
part of our offering, but wasn't really part of the public-facing web
CMS (WCMS) list of options we came to the table with. It probably is
something my old company leads with now, though.
So, we had 'short lists' or recommended tools clients should consider
that were based upon client and expected budget size, but also that were
If Marketing, we were more likely to get to propose/implement open
source/Plone because they just want a great, feature-rich 'solution' for
the best price, and don't care about whether it's written in Java or
.Net or whatever the standard skill set is of IT. Much of the time,
marketing wants to side-step IT and hire contractors and get support
from the CMS vendor anyhow.
Again, if talking to Marketing/PR, this is less of an issue, but in
discussing options with IT, we would attempt to determine to what level
they might already be using open source, and how difficult a sell this
would be, not just for us, but for the internal group trying to get the
project approved (Marketing, Human Resources, etc.)
If a client is starting off with, say the Gartner 'Magic Quadrant' ECM
Report or the Forrester 'Wave' Report (for which they've already paid
thousands), then they are less likely to have heard of open source CMS
tools (though this is slowly changing and we need to push for coverage
of Plone), and are focusing in on 'enterprise' type software and likely
have the corresponding budget size in mind as well.
See the Gartner Report
here:http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article3/article3.html
See an older Forrester Report here and notice coverage of Alfresco (open
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/infrastructure/ocs/forrester-ecm-q42007.pdf
Some clients (especially IT managers) will only blindly follow these
reports. It's called 'managing risk-to-resume' and is akin to the old
addage that 'nobody ever got fired for buying solutions from IBM'. At
least that's an old addage in the Midwest U.S., where 'Big Blue' was
always king during the mainframe days. So, IT managers see risk in
going with solutions not in the 'magic quadrant' and if we perceived
that, we knew that recommending open source was going to be more
difficult unless we could really get the business department
(marketing,
et al) to push hard for it.
Since this is the Plone Evangelism list, I think some things to take
We should do what we can to contact Gartner, Forrester, Jupiter, and
other research firms to see what we can do to get Plone represented by
their research. What benchmarks do they use to determine which tools to
cover? Is Alfresco covered because it has a corporate face/backing to it?
We should provide comparison sheets that, rather than being general
enough to cover evaluations at the 'high end' and at the 'low end', are
targeted comparisons at each end, and in the middle. For a CMS
comparison of open source tools only, Idealware.org has already done
much of the work for us. Basically, indicating that all of the primary
open source CMS tools that make it to organizations' short lists are
viable, but that the more complex functionality a client needs, the more
they need Plone. A summary grid such as the one they present in their
report would be very nice to have for each targeted 'short list' we
would want to market. Of course, it's better when an objective third
party does it, but since Plone isn't getting much public coverage in
comparison to commercial tools, we may need to do some of this
ourselves. The CMSWatch.com reports DO cover commercial and open source
tools, so maybe the foundation should purchase a report (and others) and
then publish its own 'summary report' or something that doesn't conflict
with any report's license.
I have just this week been asked to come up with my own Ektron vs. Plone
comparison report for an IT integrator that knows Plone is a better fit
for their client than Ektron, but needs the specific criteria that
proves this. It's not the first time I've been asked for such a report
by someone who is a project champion and who wants to navigate around
questions about open source or python or whether it can run on
Windows/Linux or how to host it easily/affordably (without hiring a
Python or Linux expert), etc. It could help Plone integrators to have
such marketing answers/collateral.
The most commonly requested comparisons for our firm and that I think
Plone vs. Drupal (I can now thankfully point clients to the
Idealware.org report that was produced by an objective party)
Plone vs. Sharepoint
Plone vs. Ektron
Contact clients that we know chose Plone over other (commercial or open
source) CMS tools and ask them if they'd be willing to do an interview
or to fill out a survey that asks how they believe Plone vs. CMS X
compared in terms of various factors typical of normal evaluations.
It would also be really powerful to survey our past clients and provide
'average' numbers for small, medium, and large-sized projects, when
implemented with Plone integrators versus what clients were quoted
(ranges, not actual numbers) from commercial vendors. My experience
with the commercial vendors (outside of Ektron) is that a client is
typically looking at $250K on up just to get a 'Quick Start' package,
where the integrator implements one section of the website and includes
a week of training, so the client can have their own staff finish the
rest, or pay a lot more in fees to have it finished for them.
It'd also be helpful to have an hourly rate schedule comparison of
'certified' commercial vendor integrators vs. Plone integrator firms
(leaving freelancers out of the equation so as not to compare apples and
oranges.)
I've been seeing topics for webinars from vendors such as IBM, Oracle,
and others similar to 'The Hidden Costs of Open Source' or 'Open Source
Doesn't Come Free'. Sure a Plone implementation is going to cost
something for the consulting time, but it'd be useful to have an overall
project costs comparison chart as well as an hourly consulting
comparison chart, because generally the commercial vendors are going to
charge $150-250/hr for services, while Plone services are typically
under even their low number and decision-makers need to see and consider
this.
This point is especially important as a decision-maker looks at the
3-year project cost. After implementation, a firm going with a
commercial solution is going to pay annual license fees and is going to
continue to pay higher hourly consulting fees, so the long-term costs
are even more drastically higher for a commercial system. Many
organizations are silly and only look at year-1 implementation costs and
let the following years' costs be ignored during the selection process.
Add these surveys/interviews to the Case Studies section of Plone.net.
Or, possibly even better, once we have some of these, create a new
section on Plone.net called Client Testimonials that are interviews with
clients (especially focusing on the CMS evaluation/selection process)
rather than just project recaps that focus purely on what was done with
Plone was it was selected.
Once we have client testimonials to point prospects/leads to, I'd
recommend having the Plone Foundation provide limited funding for some
Google Ads that would appear when people search for 'content management
systems', 'open source cms', 'plone', and similar terms. The ads could
have eye-catching teaser titles such as 'Why did NASA select the Plone
CMS?' There actually is a nice interview-style recap of the Plone
selection/implementation process from someone at NASA, by the way. I
recall Jon Stahl's blog or a tweet referring to it. Nice 3-part read.
If we could even get 3-4 such testimonials, I think it'd be a very
powerful and persuasive area for Plone.net and Plone would probably
benefit from teasers to this directly from the Plone.org home page.
I hope this wasn't just a walk down memory lane for me, and can help
provide some perspective for those on the list who have worked
exclusively with Plone in the CMS space.
Cheers,
Ken Wasetis
President and CMS Solution Architect
email: ken.wasetis at contextualcorp.com
office: 847.356.3027
website: www.contextualcorp.com

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger consulting
companies?"
As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies are
*really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception thing. His
"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end
alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.
Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."
This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are some
larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and Sitecore,
but when that company needs to do something low end they are using
Umbraco.
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community? Are
there companies out there that say something like 'We normally use
Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.
-Matt
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[Wouter Vanden Hove]

Post by Dylan Jay
Last conference there was a marketing sprint. Are you going to be there?
I'd like to be involved in a marketing sprint where work on completing
some of the tasks you outline such as creating comparisons sheets and
gathering testimonials and putting them on plone.org. It would be nice
to a concrete set of tasks to achieve before we hit the sprint (how?
anyone?

Task for a plone-marketing theme:

It is very instructive to compare the plone.org website with
for example openerp.com and its community website www.openobject.com

openerp.com is a marketing website that actually tries to convince
people (developers & decision makers) to try out openerp.

Compared to that I don't know what plone.org is. Really I don't.
It not really geared toward developers, not for new users, not for
evaluating decision makers.


As a plone developer and consultant I never use plone.org directly
except some deep burried bookmarked pages. I daily visit planet plone, trac
and the lists, but I don't use the plone.org website by itself, except the
searchbox.

I don't even use plone.org to refer possible clients to.
Because it contains mostly useless information for them (talking mainly
about the homepage), it doesn't even look nice. (Nobody I asked liked the
new layout of plone.org, *all* feedback was negative)

Instead I refer them to plone.net/case-studies
plone.net has an even worse layout, but it answers some important questions
new possible plone-users always have first like "who is using it".


www.plone.org is not winning any new market-share for Plone.
It rather contributes to loosing market-share.

If you want to introduce Plone into a corporate environment, plone.org is
not the way to go.

I really don't want to troll, but I'm saying this mainly because
www.plone.org reminds me of the boiled frog.

Did you know you can actually boil a frog by dropping it into cold water and
then by gradually heating the water until it's boiling? The frog doesn't
notice it because it's so gradual. but it wil react to sudden temperature
changes, if you would drop a frog into very warm water, it'll jump out
directly.

There are so many things wrong on the plone-marketing level,
that I feel that we as the plone-community behave too much like a
soon-to-be-boiled-frog.


small example besides the homepage:
http://plone.org/about is the most important link on the homepage
that you want new people to follow.
If one of the content-editors of a plone-site that I maintain
would create such a dull page: http://plone.org/about
I would probably shoot him.


Andreas Jung created this page
http://zope2.zopyx.de/about-zope-2/six-reasons-for-using-zope/zope-is-secure

Now this page by itself is 1000.000X more powerful to a corporate
decision-maker than the whole of plone.org
That page blows people off their socks,
plone.org just scares people away.




w.

[Dylan Jay]

I think there's some really good points in there. Some mentioned that
there was some new marketing collateral being prepared for the website
at some point but I'm not sure by who or with what input. Anyone know?

Post by Wouter Vanden Hove

Post by Dylan Jay
Last conference there was a marketing sprint. Are you going to be there?
I'd like to be involved in a marketing sprint where work on
completing
some of the tasks you outline such as creating comparisons sheets and
gathering testimonials and putting them on plone.org. It would be nice
to a concrete set of tasks to achieve before we hit the sprint (how?
anyone?

It is very instructive to compare the plone.org website with
for example openerp.com and its community website www.openobject.com
openerp.com is a marketing website that actually tries to convince
people (developers & decision makers) to try out openerp.
Compared to that I don't know what plone.org is. Really I don't.
It not really geared toward developers, not for new users, not for
evaluating decision makers.
As a plone developer and consultant I never use plone.org directly
except some deep burried bookmarked pages. I daily visit planet plone, trac
and the lists, but I don't use the plone.org website by itself, except the
searchbox.
I don't even use plone.org to refer possible clients to.
Because it contains mostly useless information for them (talking mainly
about the homepage), it doesn't even look nice. (Nobody I asked liked the
new layout of plone.org, *all* feedback was negative)
Instead I refer them to plone.net/case-studies
plone.net has an even worse layout, but it answers some important questions
new possible plone-users always have first like "who is using it".
www.plone.org is not winning any new market-share for Plone.
It rather contributes to loosing market-share.
If you want to introduce Plone into a corporate environment,
plone.org is
not the way to go.
I really don't want to troll, but I'm saying this mainly because
www.plone.org reminds me of the boiled frog.
Did you know you can actually boil a frog by dropping it into cold water and
then by gradually heating the water until it's boiling? The frog doesn't
notice it because it's so gradual. but it wil react to sudden
temperature
changes, if you would drop a frog into very warm water, it'll jump out
directly.
There are so many things wrong on the plone-marketing level,
that I feel that we as the plone-community behave too much like a
soon-to-be-boiled-frog.
http://plone.org/about is the most important link on the homepage
that you want new people to follow.
If one of the content-editors of a plone-site that I maintain
would create such a dull page: http://plone.org/about
I would probably shoot him.
Andreas Jung created this page
http://zope2.zopyx.de/about-zope-2/six-reasons-for-using-zope/zope-is-secure
Now this page by itself is 1000.000X more powerful to a corporate
decision-maker than the whole of plone.org
That page blows people off their socks,
plone.org just scares people away.
w.
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism

[Dylan Jay]

I think there's some really good points in there. Some mentioned that
there was some new marketing collateral being prepared for the website
at some point but I'm not sure by who or with what input. Anyone know?

Post by Wouter Vanden Hove

Post by Dylan Jay
Last conference there was a marketing sprint. Are you going to be there?
I'd like to be involved in a marketing sprint where work on
completing
some of the tasks you outline such as creating comparisons sheets and
gathering testimonials and putting them on plone.org. It would be nice
to a concrete set of tasks to achieve before we hit the sprint (how?
anyone?

It is very instructive to compare the plone.org website with
for example openerp.com and its community website www.openobject.com
openerp.com is a marketing website that actually tries to convince
people (developers & decision makers) to try out openerp.
Compared to that I don't know what plone.org is. Really I don't.
It not really geared toward developers, not for new users, not for
evaluating decision makers.
As a plone developer and consultant I never use plone.org directly
except some deep burried bookmarked pages. I daily visit planet plone, trac
and the lists, but I don't use the plone.org website by itself, except the
searchbox.
I don't even use plone.org to refer possible clients to.
Because it contains mostly useless information for them (talking mainly
about the homepage), it doesn't even look nice. (Nobody I asked liked the
new layout of plone.org, *all* feedback was negative)
Instead I refer them to plone.net/case-studies
plone.net has an even worse layout, but it answers some important questions
new possible plone-users always have first like "who is using it".
www.plone.org is not winning any new market-share for Plone.
It rather contributes to loosing market-share.
If you want to introduce Plone into a corporate environment,
plone.org is
not the way to go.
I really don't want to troll, but I'm saying this mainly because
www.plone.org reminds me of the boiled frog.
Did you know you can actually boil a frog by dropping it into cold water and
then by gradually heating the water until it's boiling? The frog doesn't
notice it because it's so gradual. but it wil react to sudden
temperature
changes, if you would drop a frog into very warm water, it'll jump out
directly.
There are so many things wrong on the plone-marketing level,
that I feel that we as the plone-community behave too much like a
soon-to-be-boiled-frog.
http://plone.org/about is the most important link on the homepage
that you want new people to follow.
If one of the content-editors of a plone-site that I maintain
would create such a dull page: http://plone.org/about
I would probably shoot him.
Andreas Jung created this page
http://zope2.zopyx.de/about-zope-2/six-reasons-for-using-zope/zope-is-secure
Now this page by itself is 1000.000X more powerful to a corporate
decision-maker than the whole of plone.org
That page blows people off their socks,
plone.org just scares people away.
w.
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
Evangelism at lists.plone.org
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism

[Takeshi Yamamoto]

This page could be helpful to make a comparison sheet.

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

Click the check boxes of Plone and few more CMS, then press Compare
button.

Takeshi

Post by Dylan Jay
that's a tremendous amount of useful information. some very
actionable items.
Last conference there was a marketing sprint. Are you going to be there?
I'd like to be involved in a marketing sprint where work on
completing some of the tasks you outline such as creating
comparisons sheets and gathering testimonials and putting them on
plone.org. It would be nice to a concrete set of tasks to achieve
before we hit the sprint (how? anyone? come up with a list of tasks
in this forum?) instead of the sprint being about deciding on the
list of tasks.
I also think it would be really good to encourage the business
development people from integrators into that sprint since a good
deal of their work is selling people on Plone, day in day out.
Marketing knowledge such as yours Ken, would also be fantastic.
---
Dylan Jay, Plone Solutions Manager
www.pretaweb.com
tel:[phone]
mob:[phone]
skype:dylan_jay

Post by ctxlken
Matt,
Back during my 'objective CMS evaluation consulting' days with another
consulting firm, it was pretty common to have a 'short list' of
recommended CMS solutions to have clients evaluate. I, of course,
always tried to have Plone on that list, because usually the
functional
requirements from clients large and small could be met by Plone, but in
those days, open source was only widely accepted at the
infrastructure
layer (Linux for OS, maybe JBoss as application server), and it was a
tougher sell (to IT folks only, really) to pitch 'enterprise'
application solutions that were open source and/or that were based on
Python, a not-so-widely accepted 'enterprise' development language by IT.
Fatwire
Percussion Rhythmyx
Vignette (becoming OpenText)
Interwoven
Documentum (now EMC)
Stellent (acquired by Oracle)
BroadVision (wow, that's going back; only on list because we had a lot
of experience with the portal delivery side of BV)
RedDot (acquired by OpenText)
Plone (it couldn't hurt to get it more exposure and to show clients
that we were knowledgeable of solid FOSS options other consultancies
didn't even know of)
RedDot (.Net for CMS, but Java-basd for portal delivery engine; Used
to be just a nice looking and easy-to-use CMS, but very feature-
rich now.)
nCompass Labs (a really nice CMS that was purchased by M$ and became
'CMS 2002', which seemed to then get killed in favor of Sharepoint.
Amazing.)
Ektron (low-end cost .Net option, but also more limited
functionality)
Plone (Realized Plone project wins after pitching it head-to-head
against the commercial tools)
Ektron (especially attractive to Windows shops)
Plone
Typo3
ezPublish
Drupal
Joomla (for only very simple CMS requirements; basically to 'add pages')
Since Plone continued to beat out other open source tools when clients
had more demanding functional equirements, we eventually slimmed that
last list down to Ektron vs. Plone
Notice that Sharepoint wasn't even on our list at the time, as we saw it
strictly as more of a 'DMS' (Document Management System) that could be
used on Intranet projects. Later on, my company bought a Microsoft
integrator that provided Sharepoint services, so that became a bigger
part of our offering, but wasn't really part of the public-facing web
CMS (WCMS) list of options we came to the table with. It probably is
something my old company leads with now, though.
So, we had 'short lists' or recommended tools clients should consider
that were based upon client and expected budget size, but also that were
If Marketing, we were more likely to get to propose/implement open
source/Plone because they just want a great, feature-rich
'solution' for
the best price, and don't care about whether it's written in Java or
.Net or whatever the standard skill set is of IT. Much of the time,
marketing wants to side-step IT and hire contractors and get support
from the CMS vendor anyhow.
Again, if talking to Marketing/PR, this is less of an issue, but in
discussing options with IT, we would attempt to determine to what level
they might already be using open source, and how difficult a sell this
would be, not just for us, but for the internal group trying to get the
project approved (Marketing, Human Resources, etc.)
If a client is starting off with, say the Gartner 'Magic Quadrant' ECM
Report or the Forrester 'Wave' Report (for which they've already paid
thousands), then they are less likely to have heard of open source CMS
tools (though this is slowly changing and we need to push for
coverage
of Plone), and are focusing in on 'enterprise' type software and likely
have the corresponding budget size in mind as well.
See the Gartner Report
here:http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article3/article3.html
See an older Forrester Report here and notice coverage of Alfresco (open
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/infrastructure/ocs/forrester-ecm-q42007.pdf
Some clients (especially IT managers) will only blindly follow these
reports. It's called 'managing risk-to-resume' and is akin to the old
addage that 'nobody ever got fired for buying solutions from IBM'.
At
least that's an old addage in the Midwest U.S., where 'Big Blue' was
always king during the mainframe days. So, IT managers see risk in
going with solutions not in the 'magic quadrant' and if we perceived
that, we knew that recommending open source was going to be more
difficult unless we could really get the business department
(marketing,
et al) to push hard for it.
Since this is the Plone Evangelism list, I think some things to take
We should do what we can to contact Gartner, Forrester, Jupiter, and
other research firms to see what we can do to get Plone represented by
their research. What benchmarks do they use to determine which tools to
cover? Is Alfresco covered because it has a corporate face/backing to it?
We should provide comparison sheets that, rather than being general
enough to cover evaluations at the 'high end' and at the 'low end', are
targeted comparisons at each end, and in the middle. For a CMS
comparison of open source tools only, Idealware.org has already done
much of the work for us. Basically, indicating that all of the primary
open source CMS tools that make it to organizations' short lists are
viable, but that the more complex functionality a client needs, the more
they need Plone. A summary grid such as the one they present in their
report would be very nice to have for each targeted 'short list' we
would want to market. Of course, it's better when an objective third
party does it, but since Plone isn't getting much public coverage in
comparison to commercial tools, we may need to do some of this
ourselves. The CMSWatch.com reports DO cover commercial and open source
tools, so maybe the foundation should purchase a report (and
others) and
then publish its own 'summary report' or something that doesn't conflict
with any report's license.
I have just this week been asked to come up with my own Ektron vs. Plone
comparison report for an IT integrator that knows Plone is a better fit
for their client than Ektron, but needs the specific criteria that
proves this. It's not the first time I've been asked for such a report
by someone who is a project champion and who wants to navigate around
questions about open source or python or whether it can run on
Windows/Linux or how to host it easily/affordably (without hiring a
Python or Linux expert), etc. It could help Plone integrators to have
such marketing answers/collateral.
The most commonly requested comparisons for our firm and that I think
Plone vs. Drupal (I can now thankfully point clients to the
Idealware.org report that was produced by an objective party)
Plone vs. Sharepoint
Plone vs. Ektron
Contact clients that we know chose Plone over other (commercial or open
source) CMS tools and ask them if they'd be willing to do an
interview
or to fill out a survey that asks how they believe Plone vs. CMS X
compared in terms of various factors typical of normal evaluations.
It would also be really powerful to survey our past clients and provide
'average' numbers for small, medium, and large-sized projects, when
implemented with Plone integrators versus what clients were quoted
(ranges, not actual numbers) from commercial vendors. My experience
with the commercial vendors (outside of Ektron) is that a client is
typically looking at $250K on up just to get a 'Quick Start' package,
where the integrator implements one section of the website and includes
a week of training, so the client can have their own staff finish the
rest, or pay a lot more in fees to have it finished for them.
It'd also be helpful to have an hourly rate schedule comparison of
'certified' commercial vendor integrators vs. Plone integrator firms
(leaving freelancers out of the equation so as not to compare
apples and
oranges.)
I've been seeing topics for webinars from vendors such as IBM, Oracle,
and others similar to 'The Hidden Costs of Open Source' or 'Open Source
Doesn't Come Free'. Sure a Plone implementation is going to cost
something for the consulting time, but it'd be useful to have an overall
project costs comparison chart as well as an hourly consulting
comparison chart, because generally the commercial vendors are going to
charge $150-250/hr for services, while Plone services are typically
under even their low number and decision-makers need to see and consider
this.
This point is especially important as a decision-maker looks at the
3-year project cost. After implementation, a firm going with a
commercial solution is going to pay annual license fees and is going to
continue to pay higher hourly consulting fees, so the long-term costs
are even more drastically higher for a commercial system. Many
organizations are silly and only look at year-1 implementation costs and
let the following years' costs be ignored during the selection process.
Add these surveys/interviews to the Case Studies section of
Plone.net.
Or, possibly even better, once we have some of these, create a new
section on Plone.net called Client Testimonials that are interviews with
clients (especially focusing on the CMS evaluation/selection process)
rather than just project recaps that focus purely on what was done with
Plone was it was selected.
Once we have client testimonials to point prospects/leads to, I'd
recommend having the Plone Foundation provide limited funding for some
Google Ads that would appear when people search for 'content
management
systems', 'open source cms', 'plone', and similar terms. The ads could
have eye-catching teaser titles such as 'Why did NASA select the Plone
CMS?' There actually is a nice interview-style recap of the Plone
selection/implementation process from someone at NASA, by the way. I
recall Jon Stahl's blog or a tweet referring to it. Nice 3-part read.
If we could even get 3-4 such testimonials, I think it'd be a very
powerful and persuasive area for Plone.net and Plone would probably
benefit from teasers to this directly from the Plone.org home page.
I hope this wasn't just a walk down memory lane for me, and can help
provide some perspective for those on the list who have worked
exclusively with Plone in the CMS space.
Cheers,
Ken Wasetis
President and CMS Solution Architect
email: ken.wasetis at contextualcorp.com
office: 847.356.3027
website: www.contextualcorp.com

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger
consulting
companies?"
As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies are
*really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception thing. His
"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end
alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.
Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."
This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are some
larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and
Sitecore,
but when that company needs to do something low end they are using
Umbraco.
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community? Are
there companies out there that say something like 'We normally use
Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.
-Matt
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[Wouter Vanden Hove]

Post by Dylan Jay
Last conference there was a marketing sprint. Are you going to be there?
I'd like to be involved in a marketing sprint where work on completing
some of the tasks you outline such as creating comparisons sheets and
gathering testimonials and putting them on plone.org. It would be nice
to a concrete set of tasks to achieve before we hit the sprint (how?
anyone?

Task for a plone-marketing theme:

It is very instructive to compare the plone.org website with
for example openerp.com and its community website www.openobject.com

openerp.com is a marketing website that actually tries to convince
people (developers & decision makers) to try out openerp.

Compared to that I don't know what plone.org is. Really I don't.
It not really geared toward developers, not for new users, not for
evaluating decision makers.


As a plone developer and consultant I never use plone.org directly
except some deep burried bookmarked pages. I daily visit planet plone, trac
and the lists, but I don't use the plone.org website by itself, except the
searchbox.

I don't even use plone.org to refer possible clients to.
Because it contains mostly useless information for them (talking mainly
about the homepage), it doesn't even look nice. (Nobody I asked liked the
new layout of plone.org, *all* feedback was negative)

Instead I refer them to plone.net/case-studies
plone.net has an even worse layout, but it answers some important questions
new possible plone-users always have first like "who is using it".


www.plone.org is not winning any new market-share for Plone.
It rather contributes to loosing market-share.

If you want to introduce Plone into a corporate environment, plone.org is
not the way to go.

I really don't want to troll, but I'm saying this mainly because
www.plone.org reminds me of the boiled frog.

Did you know you can actually boil a frog by dropping it into cold water and
then by gradually heating the water until it's boiling? The frog doesn't
notice it because it's so gradual. but it wil react to sudden temperature
changes, if you would drop a frog into very warm water, it'll jump out
directly.

There are so many things wrong on the plone-marketing level,
that I feel that we as the plone-community behave too much like a
soon-to-be-boiled-frog.


small example besides the homepage:
http://plone.org/about is the most important link on the homepage
that you want new people to follow.
If one of the content-editors of a plone-site that I maintain
would create such a dull page: http://plone.org/about
I would probably shoot him.


Andreas Jung created this page
http://zope2.zopyx.de/about-zope-2/six-reasons-for-using-zope/zope-is-secure

Now this page by itself is 1000.000X more powerful to a corporate
decision-maker than the whole of plone.org
That page blows people off their socks,
plone.org just scares people away.




w.

[Dylan Jay]

that's a tremendous amount of useful information. some very actionable
items.
Last conference there was a marketing sprint. Are you going to be there?
I'd like to be involved in a marketing sprint where work on completing
some of the tasks you outline such as creating comparisons sheets and
gathering testimonials and putting them on plone.org. It would be nice
to a concrete set of tasks to achieve before we hit the sprint (how?
anyone? come up with a list of tasks in this forum?) instead of the
sprint being about deciding on the list of tasks.
I also think it would be really good to encourage the business
development people from integrators into that sprint since a good deal
of their work is selling people on Plone, day in day out. Marketing
knowledge such as yours Ken, would also be fantastic.


---
Dylan Jay, Plone Solutions Manager
www.pretaweb.com
tel:[phone]
mob:[phone]
skype:dylan_jay

Post by ctxlken
Matt,
Back during my 'objective CMS evaluation consulting' days with another
consulting firm, it was pretty common to have a 'short list' of
recommended CMS solutions to have clients evaluate. I, of course,
always tried to have Plone on that list, because usually the
functional
requirements from clients large and small could be met by Plone, but in
those days, open source was only widely accepted at the infrastructure
layer (Linux for OS, maybe JBoss as application server), and it was a
tougher sell (to IT folks only, really) to pitch 'enterprise'
application solutions that were open source and/or that were based on
Python, a not-so-widely accepted 'enterprise' development language by IT.
Fatwire
Percussion Rhythmyx
Vignette (becoming OpenText)
Interwoven
Documentum (now EMC)
Stellent (acquired by Oracle)
BroadVision (wow, that's going back; only on list because we had a lot
of experience with the portal delivery side of BV)
RedDot (acquired by OpenText)
Plone (it couldn't hurt to get it more exposure and to show clients
that we were knowledgeable of solid FOSS options other consultancies
didn't even know of)
RedDot (.Net for CMS, but Java-basd for portal delivery engine; Used
to be just a nice looking and easy-to-use CMS, but very feature-rich now.)
nCompass Labs (a really nice CMS that was purchased by M$ and became
'CMS 2002', which seemed to then get killed in favor of Sharepoint.
Amazing.)
Ektron (low-end cost .Net option, but also more limited
functionality)
Plone (Realized Plone project wins after pitching it head-to-head
against the commercial tools)
Ektron (especially attractive to Windows shops)
Plone
Typo3
ezPublish
Drupal
Joomla (for only very simple CMS requirements; basically to 'add pages')
Since Plone continued to beat out other open source tools when clients
had more demanding functional equirements, we eventually slimmed that
last list down to Ektron vs. Plone
Notice that Sharepoint wasn't even on our list at the time, as we saw it
strictly as more of a 'DMS' (Document Management System) that could be
used on Intranet projects. Later on, my company bought a Microsoft
integrator that provided Sharepoint services, so that became a bigger
part of our offering, but wasn't really part of the public-facing web
CMS (WCMS) list of options we came to the table with. It probably is
something my old company leads with now, though.
So, we had 'short lists' or recommended tools clients should consider
that were based upon client and expected budget size, but also that were
If Marketing, we were more likely to get to propose/implement open
source/Plone because they just want a great, feature-rich 'solution' for
the best price, and don't care about whether it's written in Java or
.Net or whatever the standard skill set is of IT. Much of the time,
marketing wants to side-step IT and hire contractors and get support
from the CMS vendor anyhow.
Again, if talking to Marketing/PR, this is less of an issue, but in
discussing options with IT, we would attempt to determine to what level
they might already be using open source, and how difficult a sell this
would be, not just for us, but for the internal group trying to get the
project approved (Marketing, Human Resources, etc.)
If a client is starting off with, say the Gartner 'Magic Quadrant' ECM
Report or the Forrester 'Wave' Report (for which they've already paid
thousands), then they are less likely to have heard of open source CMS
tools (though this is slowly changing and we need to push for coverage
of Plone), and are focusing in on 'enterprise' type software and likely
have the corresponding budget size in mind as well.
See the Gartner Report
here:http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article3/article3.html
See an older Forrester Report here and notice coverage of Alfresco (open
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/infrastructure/ocs/forrester-ecm-q42007.pdf
Some clients (especially IT managers) will only blindly follow these
reports. It's called 'managing risk-to-resume' and is akin to the old
addage that 'nobody ever got fired for buying solutions from IBM'. At
least that's an old addage in the Midwest U.S., where 'Big Blue' was
always king during the mainframe days. So, IT managers see risk in
going with solutions not in the 'magic quadrant' and if we perceived
that, we knew that recommending open source was going to be more
difficult unless we could really get the business department
(marketing,
et al) to push hard for it.
Since this is the Plone Evangelism list, I think some things to take
We should do what we can to contact Gartner, Forrester, Jupiter, and
other research firms to see what we can do to get Plone represented by
their research. What benchmarks do they use to determine which tools to
cover? Is Alfresco covered because it has a corporate face/backing to it?
We should provide comparison sheets that, rather than being general
enough to cover evaluations at the 'high end' and at the 'low end', are
targeted comparisons at each end, and in the middle. For a CMS
comparison of open source tools only, Idealware.org has already done
much of the work for us. Basically, indicating that all of the primary
open source CMS tools that make it to organizations' short lists are
viable, but that the more complex functionality a client needs, the more
they need Plone. A summary grid such as the one they present in their
report would be very nice to have for each targeted 'short list' we
would want to market. Of course, it's better when an objective third
party does it, but since Plone isn't getting much public coverage in
comparison to commercial tools, we may need to do some of this
ourselves. The CMSWatch.com reports DO cover commercial and open source
tools, so maybe the foundation should purchase a report (and others) and
then publish its own 'summary report' or something that doesn't conflict
with any report's license.
I have just this week been asked to come up with my own Ektron vs. Plone
comparison report for an IT integrator that knows Plone is a better fit
for their client than Ektron, but needs the specific criteria that
proves this. It's not the first time I've been asked for such a report
by someone who is a project champion and who wants to navigate around
questions about open source or python or whether it can run on
Windows/Linux or how to host it easily/affordably (without hiring a
Python or Linux expert), etc. It could help Plone integrators to have
such marketing answers/collateral.
The most commonly requested comparisons for our firm and that I think
Plone vs. Drupal (I can now thankfully point clients to the
Idealware.org report that was produced by an objective party)
Plone vs. Sharepoint
Plone vs. Ektron
Contact clients that we know chose Plone over other (commercial or open
source) CMS tools and ask them if they'd be willing to do an interview
or to fill out a survey that asks how they believe Plone vs. CMS X
compared in terms of various factors typical of normal evaluations.
It would also be really powerful to survey our past clients and provide
'average' numbers for small, medium, and large-sized projects, when
implemented with Plone integrators versus what clients were quoted
(ranges, not actual numbers) from commercial vendors. My experience
with the commercial vendors (outside of Ektron) is that a client is
typically looking at $250K on up just to get a 'Quick Start' package,
where the integrator implements one section of the website and
includes
a week of training, so the client can have their own staff finish the
rest, or pay a lot more in fees to have it finished for them.
It'd also be helpful to have an hourly rate schedule comparison of
'certified' commercial vendor integrators vs. Plone integrator firms
(leaving freelancers out of the equation so as not to compare apples and
oranges.)
I've been seeing topics for webinars from vendors such as IBM, Oracle,
and others similar to 'The Hidden Costs of Open Source' or 'Open Source
Doesn't Come Free'. Sure a Plone implementation is going to cost
something for the consulting time, but it'd be useful to have an overall
project costs comparison chart as well as an hourly consulting
comparison chart, because generally the commercial vendors are going to
charge $150-250/hr for services, while Plone services are typically
under even their low number and decision-makers need to see and consider
this.
This point is especially important as a decision-maker looks at the
3-year project cost. After implementation, a firm going with a
commercial solution is going to pay annual license fees and is going to
continue to pay higher hourly consulting fees, so the long-term costs
are even more drastically higher for a commercial system. Many
organizations are silly and only look at year-1 implementation costs and
let the following years' costs be ignored during the selection
process.
Add these surveys/interviews to the Case Studies section of Plone.net.
Or, possibly even better, once we have some of these, create a new
section on Plone.net called Client Testimonials that are interviews with
clients (especially focusing on the CMS evaluation/selection process)
rather than just project recaps that focus purely on what was done with
Plone was it was selected.
Once we have client testimonials to point prospects/leads to, I'd
recommend having the Plone Foundation provide limited funding for some
Google Ads that would appear when people search for 'content
management
systems', 'open source cms', 'plone', and similar terms. The ads could
have eye-catching teaser titles such as 'Why did NASA select the Plone
CMS?' There actually is a nice interview-style recap of the Plone
selection/implementation process from someone at NASA, by the way. I
recall Jon Stahl's blog or a tweet referring to it. Nice 3-part read.
If we could even get 3-4 such testimonials, I think it'd be a very
powerful and persuasive area for Plone.net and Plone would probably
benefit from teasers to this directly from the Plone.org home page.
I hope this wasn't just a walk down memory lane for me, and can help
provide some perspective for those on the list who have worked
exclusively with Plone in the CMS space.
Cheers,
Ken Wasetis
President and CMS Solution Architect
email: ken.wasetis at contextualcorp.com
office: 847.356.3027
website: www.contextualcorp.com

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger
consulting
companies?"
As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies are
*really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception thing. His
"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end
alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.
Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."
This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are some
larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and
Sitecore,
but when that company needs to do something low end they are using
Umbraco.
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community? Are
there companies out there that say something like 'We normally use
Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.
-Matt
--
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Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk [phone]
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
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[Dylan Jay]

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger consulting
companies?"
As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies
are *really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception
"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end
alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.
Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."
This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are
some larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and
Sitecore, but when that company needs to do something low end they
are using Umbraco.
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community?
Are there companies out there that say something like 'We normally
use Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.

Still haven't worked out how best to reply. You're talking about both
marketing positioning and company size. I'm not sure if they are
related.
With regard to positioning, we tend to put plone at the bigger end.
It's like sitecore etc but more flexible due to being open source
(more integration hooks) and lower total cost of ownership). However
unlike you Umbraco it's not .net or java so it's going to be headache
if they want to support it internally so it almost has to be better
than the alternatives for many in enterprise to accept it. So perhaps
we should be looking at what Plone really can do better [1]

As for consulting company size. My guess is that because Plone
requires a big learning curve so it's an investment for any consulting
firm take on for occasional use, even if they were a python shop. That
means most Plone shops specialise in it. But my guess is as good as
anyones.

[1] for me plone's strength lies in it's filesystem like model that
allows people to build up very different solutions using building
blocks with quite sophisticated delegation of tasks. I wish there was
a nice buzz word for that.

[Karl Horak]

I've been running this msg thread through my mind for several days now and in
light of the idea that we should include testimonials on Plone.net for how
the CMS decision was made, here's a go at what we did in Cooperative
International Programs at Sandia National Laboratories.

Back in the late 90s we "discovered" Python as a great language for
scripting, especially data mining. We had a terrific young Python
programmer on staff and when customer requirements started to move towards
complex CMS domains (ca 2003), we found that Zope was a logical, secure,
safe, and effective solution. Within a year, we had found that Plone did
all the heavy lifting for us.

Since then we've built about 60 sites, large and small, mostly small. Plone
lets us serve 500 MB document collections as well as micro-sites for one-off
websites to support a single staff member's workshop.

Sandia relies heavily on SharePoint for internal information silos and now
has an external SP server. However, Plone is easier to customize for
project brand identification, goes beyond mere document management, is far
more usable, has almost unlimited flexibility, and can be ported to our
international partners without a huge MS price tag.

International Programs still remains a very small corner of Sandia's IT
environment, but as we continue to succeed with pragmatic solutions and
solid deployments, we've gotten the attention of other IT and Web groups.
As you can see, our Plone decision was actually an organic growth from
Python to Zope to Plone. Only this month are we migrating up to 3.x.

Nearby City of Albuquerque and Albuquerque Public Schools went to Plone
based on their own independent decision-making processes. A few other local
entities embraced Plone as well. The end result is a surprising enclave of
Plone out here in NM.

Because we grew into Plone, the learning curve wasn't as steep as the urban
myth would have it. Excellent training has been available at every step
along the way (kudos to Joel Burton and Enfold Systems). Much to my
surprise, we haven't had to avail ourselves of the many readily available
consultancies out there.

In the end, I guess we're a small organization embedded within a large
organization and I'm of no help in that debate. We get basic CMS site
requests on a routine basis, but then there are some off-the-wall
requirements that come in. They haven't stumped Plone yet. Low cost,
flexibility, security, customizable workflow, UML-to-product development
path, and the backing of a solid community have made Plone the right
decision for us.

All that said, this doesn't help much in targeting the Plone marketing
strategy. I concur that emphasizing the positive (what Plone does well) is
important and that crafting stories for successful deployments across all
scales will make a difference.

Just sign me,

No regrets

Post by Dylan Jay
Still haven't worked out how best to reply. You're talking about both
marketing positioning and company size. I'm not sure if they are
related.
With regard to positioning, we tend to put plone at the bigger end.
It's like sitecore etc but more flexible due to being open source
(more integration hooks) and lower total cost of ownership). However
unlike you Umbraco it's not .net or java so it's going to be headache
if they want to support it internally so it almost has to be better
than the alternatives for many in enterprise to accept it. So perhaps
we should be looking at what Plone really can do better [1]
As for consulting company size. My guess is that because Plone
requires a big learning curve so it's an investment for any consulting
firm take on for occasional use, even if they were a python shop. That
means most Plone shops specialise in it. But my guess is as good as
anyones.
[1] for me plone's strength lies in it's filesystem like model that
allows people to build up very different solutions using building
blocks with quite sophisticated delegation of tasks. I wish there was
a nice buzz word for that.
_______________________________________________
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[Wouter Vanden Hove]

"Sandia relies heavily on SharePoint for internal information silos and now
has an external SP server. ?However, Plone is easier to customize for
project brand identification, goes beyond mere document management, is far
more usable, has almost unlimited flexibility, and can be ported to our
international partners without a huge MS price tag."

Don't make people search for an elevator pitch like this.
Such quotes belong in big on the front-page of plone.org
Every week another one. "Plone Quote of the week"

Here is mine:
"I just saw your demo of Plone. Now I'm confused: last week I saw a demo
about Sharepoint. Or Plone is really superior to sharepoint in many ways,
or I saw a really bad demo about sharepoint." - Business manager of a very
large Belgian IT-company.

[Wouter Vanden Hove]

"Sandia relies heavily on SharePoint for internal information silos and now
has an external SP server. ?However, Plone is easier to customize for
project brand identification, goes beyond mere document management, is far
more usable, has almost unlimited flexibility, and can be ported to our
international partners without a huge MS price tag."

Don't make people search for an elevator pitch like this.
Such quotes belong in big on the front-page of plone.org
Every week another one. "Plone Quote of the week"

Here is mine:
"I just saw your demo of Plone. Now I'm confused: last week I saw a demo
about Sharepoint. Or Plone is really superior to sharepoint in many ways,
or I saw a really bad demo about sharepoint." - Business manager of a very
large Belgian IT-company.

[Karl Horak]

I've been running this msg thread through my mind for several days now and in
light of the idea that we should include testimonials on Plone.net for how
the CMS decision was made, here's a go at what we did in Cooperative
International Programs at Sandia National Laboratories.

Back in the late 90s we "discovered" Python as a great language for
scripting, especially data mining. We had a terrific young Python
programmer on staff and when customer requirements started to move towards
complex CMS domains (ca 2003), we found that Zope was a logical, secure,
safe, and effective solution. Within a year, we had found that Plone did
all the heavy lifting for us.

Since then we've built about 60 sites, large and small, mostly small. Plone
lets us serve 500 MB document collections as well as micro-sites for one-off
websites to support a single staff member's workshop.

Sandia relies heavily on SharePoint for internal information silos and now
has an external SP server. However, Plone is easier to customize for
project brand identification, goes beyond mere document management, is far
more usable, has almost unlimited flexibility, and can be ported to our
international partners without a huge MS price tag.

International Programs still remains a very small corner of Sandia's IT
environment, but as we continue to succeed with pragmatic solutions and
solid deployments, we've gotten the attention of other IT and Web groups.
As you can see, our Plone decision was actually an organic growth from
Python to Zope to Plone. Only this month are we migrating up to 3.x.

Nearby City of Albuquerque and Albuquerque Public Schools went to Plone
based on their own independent decision-making processes. A few other local
entities embraced Plone as well. The end result is a surprising enclave of
Plone out here in NM.

Because we grew into Plone, the learning curve wasn't as steep as the urban
myth would have it. Excellent training has been available at every step
along the way (kudos to Joel Burton and Enfold Systems). Much to my
surprise, we haven't had to avail ourselves of the many readily available
consultancies out there.

In the end, I guess we're a small organization embedded within a large
organization and I'm of no help in that debate. We get basic CMS site
requests on a routine basis, but then there are some off-the-wall
requirements that come in. They haven't stumped Plone yet. Low cost,
flexibility, security, customizable workflow, UML-to-product development
path, and the backing of a solid community have made Plone the right
decision for us.

All that said, this doesn't help much in targeting the Plone marketing
strategy. I concur that emphasizing the positive (what Plone does well) is
important and that crafting stories for successful deployments across all
scales will make a difference.

Just sign me,

No regrets

Post by Dylan Jay
Still haven't worked out how best to reply. You're talking about both
marketing positioning and company size. I'm not sure if they are
related.
With regard to positioning, we tend to put plone at the bigger end.
It's like sitecore etc but more flexible due to being open source
(more integration hooks) and lower total cost of ownership). However
unlike you Umbraco it's not .net or java so it's going to be headache
if they want to support it internally so it almost has to be better
than the alternatives for many in enterprise to accept it. So perhaps
we should be looking at what Plone really can do better [1]
As for consulting company size. My guess is that because Plone
requires a big learning curve so it's an investment for any consulting
firm take on for occasional use, even if they were a python shop. That
means most Plone shops specialise in it. But my guess is as good as
anyones.
[1] for me plone's strength lies in it's filesystem like model that
allows people to build up very different solutions using building
blocks with quite sophisticated delegation of tasks. I wish there was
a nice buzz word for that.
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
Evangelism at lists.plone.org
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism

[Karl Horak]

Post by Matt Hamilton
...
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community? Are
there companies out there that say something like 'We normally use
Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.
-Matt

Our corporate IT folks have been studying enterprise CMS for years. Our
internal portal has gone from Vignette to Oracle to (probably) JBoss.
SharePoint is used for a tremendous number of internal collaboration sites.

Meanwhile, for external use, my small group has been using Plone for over 5
years and its success is starting to catch the attention of corporate
decision-makers.

Gotta busy day and will expand in detail later.

Karl

[Hanno Schlichting]

At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big boys
saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the message that
Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/cheaper etc' than the
big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.

I think it depends highly on your perception of what small / medium /
large here means. Is a small CMS a personal Wordpress blog or one-off
brochure-ware site? Plone isn't very competitive in that scale unless
you have already invested in Plone.

Looking at the projects we do over here, we have anything from what we
call small 10 to 50 hours projects, medium sized 50 - 250 hour
projects and numerous large projects that exceed that scale. Our
largest project right now is a multi-year project soon going to hit
8000 development hours, an intranet for an international company with
about 5000 logged in users. Doing a project of that scale with an
essentially 10 man company next to other stuff isn't easy and has some
challenges. But looking at those numbers I find it quite hard to judge
what constitutes a small or large project and how that relates to
"what the big boys" do.

Hanno

[Dylan Jay]

---
Dylan Jay, Plone Solutions Manager
www.pretaweb.com
tel:[phone]
mob:[phone]
skype:dylan_jay

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger consulting
companies?"
As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies
are *really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception
"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end
alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.
Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."
This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are
some larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and
Sitecore, but when that company needs to do something low end they
are using Umbraco.
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community?
Are there companies out there that say something like 'We normally
use Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?

I was talking two a founder of a .net/sharepoint shop the other day. A
couple of things are interesting.

1) .net/sharepoint seems pretty common (or other CMS). Consultancies
working on bespoke work at the .net level and doing CMS work when
called on. I've come across some bigger java/jboss type shops that are
similar. I suspect they are supported by big corporate custom systems,
the sort of thing that doesn't get done in python. Being a generalised
software consulatncy is going to broaden your client base and so
increase your growth as a company I suspect.

2) They do ok for reselling sharepoint licenses. It's extra revenue.
And in general the market value of .net work is higher than python.

I'm not sure where this leaves us, but I think that it is really
interesting that plone as a community doesn't know much about its
integrators. A survey on all the companies servicing plone would make
an excellent talk at the conference... at least for me.

Think about it this way. If Plone were a propriatory product, the
mother company would know a awful lot about it's value added
resellers. The reason is, they are an essential part of creating a
successful product. Modern software companies know that enabling your
channel partners and resellers to make a successful business means the
product gets out there and in more useful ways than the mother company
ever could by itself. Plone as a community is as interested in growth
as much any propriatory company is. Understanding our who our
integrators are could be a valuable first step to increasing it's take
up.

Post by Matt Hamilton
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.

We generally pitch it as an enterprise system for those that want more
flexibility. Plone isn't really simple enough for a small web
consultancy to pick up for the odd jobs. It's really a full time
thing. We also try to sell it into the bigger market because plone
plone can compete where others can't... workflow, flexible security,
web document management, multisite deployments, so the customers value
it more.

If you want something to put up a quick brochure ware site then your
compete against all teh cheap php coders and it's a waste of plone
talent.

Post by Matt Hamilton
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.
-Matt
--
Matt Hamilton matth at netsight.co.uk
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk [phone]
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
Evangelism at lists.plone.org
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism

[ctxlken]

Matt,

Back during my 'objective CMS evaluation consulting' days with another
consulting firm, it was pretty common to have a 'short list' of
recommended CMS solutions to have clients evaluate. I, of course,
always tried to have Plone on that list, because usually the functional
requirements from clients large and small could be met by Plone, but in
those days, open source was only widely accepted at the infrastructure
layer (Linux for OS, maybe JBoss as application server), and it was a
tougher sell (to IT folks only, really) to pitch 'enterprise'
application solutions that were open source and/or that were based on
Python, a not-so-widely accepted 'enterprise' development language by IT.

The typical 'short lists' looked like this:

Enterprise CMS list:

Fatwire
Percussion Rhythmyx
Vignette (becoming OpenText)
Interwoven
Documentum (now EMC)
Stellent (acquired by Oracle)
BroadVision (wow, that's going back; only on list because we had a lot
of experience with the portal delivery side of BV)
RedDot (acquired by OpenText)
Plone (it couldn't hurt to get it more exposure and to show clients
that we were knowledgeable of solid FOSS options other consultancies
didn't even know of)


Windows/.NetShops CMS list:
RedDot (.Net for CMS, but Java-basd for portal delivery engine; Used
to be just a nice looking and easy-to-use CMS, but very feature-rich now.)
nCompass Labs (a really nice CMS that was purchased by M$ and became
'CMS 2002', which seemed to then get killed in favor of Sharepoint.
Amazing.)
Ektron (low-end cost .Net option, but also more limited functionality)
Plone (Realized Plone project wins after pitching it head-to-head
against the commercial tools)


Affordable/Open Source CMS List:
Ektron (especially attractive to Windows shops)
Plone
Typo3
ezPublish
Drupal
Joomla (for only very simple CMS requirements; basically to 'add pages')


Since Plone continued to beat out other open source tools when clients
had more demanding functional equirements, we eventually slimmed that
last list down to Ektron vs. Plone

Notice that Sharepoint wasn't even on our list at the time, as we saw it
strictly as more of a 'DMS' (Document Management System) that could be
used on Intranet projects. Later on, my company bought a Microsoft
integrator that provided Sharepoint services, so that became a bigger
part of our offering, but wasn't really part of the public-facing web
CMS (WCMS) list of options we came to the table with. It probably is
something my old company leads with now, though.


So, we had 'short lists' or recommended tools clients should consider
that were based upon client and expected budget size, but also that were
based upon these other criteria that I believe come into play:

Decision Maker - IT vs. Marketing:

If Marketing, we were more likely to get to propose/implement open
source/Plone because they just want a great, feature-rich 'solution' for
the best price, and don't care about whether it's written in Java or
.Net or whatever the standard skill set is of IT. Much of the time,
marketing wants to side-step IT and hire contractors and get support
from the CMS vendor anyhow.


Open Source Adoption Likelihood:

Again, if talking to Marketing/PR, this is less of an issue, but in
discussing options with IT, we would attempt to determine to what level
they might already be using open source, and how difficult a sell this
would be, not just for us, but for the internal group trying to get the
project approved (Marketing, Human Resources, etc.)


Magic Quadrant Effect:

If a client is starting off with, say the Gartner 'Magic Quadrant' ECM
Report or the Forrester 'Wave' Report (for which they've already paid
thousands), then they are less likely to have heard of open source CMS
tools (though this is slowly changing and we need to push for coverage
of Plone), and are focusing in on 'enterprise' type software and likely
have the corresponding budget size in mind as well.

See the Gartner Report
here:http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article3/article3.html

See an older Forrester Report here and notice coverage of Alfresco (open
source):
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/infrastructure/ocs/forrester-ecm-q42007.pdf

Some clients (especially IT managers) will only blindly follow these
reports. It's called 'managing risk-to-resume' and is akin to the old
addage that 'nobody ever got fired for buying solutions from IBM'. At
least that's an old addage in the Midwest U.S., where 'Big Blue' was
always king during the mainframe days. So, IT managers see risk in
going with solutions not in the 'magic quadrant' and if we perceived
that, we knew that recommending open source was going to be more
difficult unless we could really get the business department (marketing,
et al) to push hard for it.

Since this is the Plone Evangelism list, I think some things to take
aware are:

1) Research Coverage:

We should do what we can to contact Gartner, Forrester, Jupiter, and
other research firms to see what we can do to get Plone represented by
their research. What benchmarks do they use to determine which tools to
cover? Is Alfresco covered because it has a corporate face/backing to it?


2) Comparison Sheets:

We should provide comparison sheets that, rather than being general
enough to cover evaluations at the 'high end' and at the 'low end', are
targeted comparisons at each end, and in the middle. For a CMS
comparison of open source tools only, Idealware.org has already done
much of the work for us. Basically, indicating that all of the primary
open source CMS tools that make it to organizations' short lists are
viable, but that the more complex functionality a client needs, the more
they need Plone. A summary grid such as the one they present in their
report would be very nice to have for each targeted 'short list' we
would want to market. Of course, it's better when an objective third
party does it, but since Plone isn't getting much public coverage in
comparison to commercial tools, we may need to do some of this
ourselves. The CMSWatch.com reports DO cover commercial and open source
tools, so maybe the foundation should purchase a report (and others) and
then publish its own 'summary report' or something that doesn't conflict
with any report's license.

I have just this week been asked to come up with my own Ektron vs. Plone
comparison report for an IT integrator that knows Plone is a better fit
for their client than Ektron, but needs the specific criteria that
proves this. It's not the first time I've been asked for such a report
by someone who is a project champion and who wants to navigate around
questions about open source or python or whether it can run on
Windows/Linux or how to host it easily/affordably (without hiring a
Python or Linux expert), etc. It could help Plone integrators to have
such marketing answers/collateral.

The most commonly requested comparisons for our firm and that I think
would be most helpful are:

Plone vs. Drupal (I can now thankfully point clients to the
Idealware.org report that was produced by an objective party)
Plone vs. Sharepoint
Plone vs. Ektron


3) Client Testimonies:

Contact clients that we know chose Plone over other (commercial or open
source) CMS tools and ask them if they'd be willing to do an interview
or to fill out a survey that asks how they believe Plone vs. CMS X
compared in terms of various factors typical of normal evaluations.

It would also be really powerful to survey our past clients and provide
'average' numbers for small, medium, and large-sized projects, when
implemented with Plone integrators versus what clients were quoted
(ranges, not actual numbers) from commercial vendors. My experience
with the commercial vendors (outside of Ektron) is that a client is
typically looking at $250K on up just to get a 'Quick Start' package,
where the integrator implements one section of the website and includes
a week of training, so the client can have their own staff finish the
rest, or pay a lot more in fees to have it finished for them.


4) Cost Comparison Collateral:
It'd also be helpful to have an hourly rate schedule comparison of
'certified' commercial vendor integrators vs. Plone integrator firms
(leaving freelancers out of the equation so as not to compare apples and
oranges.)

I've been seeing topics for webinars from vendors such as IBM, Oracle,
and others similar to 'The Hidden Costs of Open Source' or 'Open Source
Doesn't Come Free'. Sure a Plone implementation is going to cost
something for the consulting time, but it'd be useful to have an overall
project costs comparison chart as well as an hourly consulting
comparison chart, because generally the commercial vendors are going to
charge $150-250/hr for services, while Plone services are typically
under even their low number and decision-makers need to see and consider
this.

This point is especially important as a decision-maker looks at the
3-year project cost. After implementation, a firm going with a
commercial solution is going to pay annual license fees and is going to
continue to pay higher hourly consulting fees, so the long-term costs
are even more drastically higher for a commercial system. Many
organizations are silly and only look at year-1 implementation costs and
let the following years' costs be ignored during the selection process.


5) Plone.net:

Add these surveys/interviews to the Case Studies section of Plone.net.
Or, possibly even better, once we have some of these, create a new
section on Plone.net called Client Testimonials that are interviews with
clients (especially focusing on the CMS evaluation/selection process)
rather than just project recaps that focus purely on what was done with
Plone was it was selected.


6) Plone Foundation Advertising via Google Ads:

Once we have client testimonials to point prospects/leads to, I'd
recommend having the Plone Foundation provide limited funding for some
Google Ads that would appear when people search for 'content management
systems', 'open source cms', 'plone', and similar terms. The ads could
have eye-catching teaser titles such as 'Why did NASA select the Plone
CMS?' There actually is a nice interview-style recap of the Plone
selection/implementation process from someone at NASA, by the way. I
recall Jon Stahl's blog or a tweet referring to it. Nice 3-part read.

If we could even get 3-4 such testimonials, I think it'd be a very
powerful and persuasive area for Plone.net and Plone would probably
benefit from teasers to this directly from the Plone.org home page.


I hope this wasn't just a walk down memory lane for me, and can help
provide some perspective for those on the list who have worked
exclusively with Plone in the CMS space.

Cheers,

Ken Wasetis
President and CMS Solution Architect
email: ken.wasetis at contextualcorp.com
office: 847.356.3027
website: www.contextualcorp.com

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger consulting
companies?"
As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies are
*really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception thing. His
"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.
Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."
This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are some
larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and Sitecore,
but when that company needs to do something low end they are using
Umbraco.
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community? Are
there companies out there that say something like 'We normally use
Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.
-Matt
--
Matt Hamilton [hidden email]
<http://n2.nabble.com/user/SendEmail.jtp?type=node&node=3376803&i=0>
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk [phone]
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
_______________________________________________
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[Dylan Jay]

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger consulting
companies?"
As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies
are *really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception
"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end
alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.
Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."
This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are
some larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and
Sitecore, but when that company needs to do something low end they
are using Umbraco.
So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community?
Are there companies out there that say something like 'We normally
use Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?
At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.
What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.

Still haven't worked out how best to reply. You're talking about both
marketing positioning and company size. I'm not sure if they are
related.
With regard to positioning, we tend to put plone at the bigger end.
It's like sitecore etc but more flexible due to being open source
(more integration hooks) and lower total cost of ownership). However
unlike you Umbraco it's not .net or java so it's going to be headache
if they want to support it internally so it almost has to be better
than the alternatives for many in enterprise to accept it. So perhaps
we should be looking at what Plone really can do better [1]

As for consulting company size. My guess is that because Plone
requires a big learning curve so it's an investment for any consulting
firm take on for occasional use, even if they were a python shop. That
means most Plone shops specialise in it. But my guess is as good as
anyones.

[1] for me plone's strength lies in it's filesystem like model that
allows people to build up very different solutions using building
blocks with quite sophisticated delegation of tasks. I wish there was
a nice buzz word for that.

[Matt Hamilton]

Post by Matt Hamilton

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

In a further development on this, I privately emailed Janus to ask him:

"One question to a point slightly raised on your
post. You mention that Plone consulting companies are generally quite
small. How does this compare to the other Open Source systems you
mentioned, ie. Umbraco, Liferay, Typo3? Do they have larger consulting
companies?"

As I was genuinely interested to see if Plone consulting companies are
*really* smaller than others, or if it is just a perception thing. His
response as this:

"I would say Umbraco has been the most successful in attracting larger
consulting companies. I am speculating this may be due to large
consultancies with .NET skills using Umbraco as a low-end alternative to
commercial systems such as EPiServer and Sitecore.

Let me know your thoughts and then I'll write a blog about it."

This is a very interesting point. So he is saying that there are some
larger companies using other .NET CMSs such as EPiServer and Sitecore,
but when that company needs to do something low end they are using
Umbraco.

So is this a good thing? What does it mean to the Plone community? Are
there companies out there that say something like 'We normally use
Vignette, but in this smaller case we will use Plone'?

At the moment I think we are often trying to pitch against the big
boys saying our system can do everything they can. But maybe the
message that Umbraco is using is 'we are lighter/smaller/quicker/
cheaper etc' than the big boys. I know in reality Plone can/does use
both messages.

What are your thoughts? I want to gather them up to send to Janus.

-Matt

[Matt Hamilton]

Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'

http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/

A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

-Matt

[Dylan Jay]

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

It's a very sticky question which we've recently been dealing with a
gov in our country. Probity is very important for governments it
seems, or at least ours. We do seem to be making real progress and
were thinking of giving a talk at the conference about this subject.
You must have come up with similar barriers with your gov work Matt?

[Matt Hamilton]

Post by Matt Hamilton
Janus Boye just published an article entitled 'Is Plone a Good CMS?'
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/is-plone-a-good-cms/
A fairly even article saying basically 'Danish Govt say Plone is a
good CMS, but is it fair that they pick one?'

There are some fantastic comments at the bottom of this post now by
Martin Aspeli and Ken Wasetis. Great work guys, some nice insights
into 'big firm' consulting and how they go about things.

-Matt