Netsight Blog

Last week I presented a case study talk at IMS 2009 in London. The talk was entitled 'The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a large Corporate Intranet'.

The slidecast with audio is below, or you can download the PDF version of the slides, or the MP3 version of the audio.

Abstract

The advantages of Open Source systems go beyond simple cost savings. Content management by its very nature requires a significant level of customisation and integration to meet business requirements. By not prohibiting the inspection and modification of the source code, Open Source enables a level of flexibility not available with proprietary systems.

This talk will present a case study of the process one corporation, Belron, went through in the development of a corporate Intranet based on Plone. Belron is the world's largest vehicle glass repair and replacement company, owning some of the best known brands in the industry including Carglass, Autoglass, O'Brien and Safelite. Belron employs more than 19, 500 people working in 28 countries worldwide.

In this talk you will see how the flexibility of Open Source allowed an initial modest Intranet to adapt and grow over time to an organisation's evolving requirements, and the development of multiple sub-sites, specific business processes and multilingual support. You will also see how Open Source's licensing model allows un-fettered growth and deployment of the Intranet to multiple countries.

This year we have been representing Plone at the IMS / Online 2009 expo at Earl Court Olympia in London.

The final day of IMS was a bit slower that the previous two days, which might have been a blessing in disguise as we were all feeling a little tired after the previous two days of non-stop talking to people on the stand.

That said we still had a good number of people come to the stand to come and see Plone. One person came down from the Online 09 conference happening up in the conference centre saying "I've been seeing a lot about Plone on Twitter, so thought I'd come take a look".

Again, another very diverse lot of people coming to the stand, we talked to a high street mobile phone retailer, a large publishing company, a nursing college, a university, an association of barristers, a django developer, and a school, amongst many others.

In total over the three days we handed out over 250 Plone brochures, probably spoke to about 300 people on the stand, and collected contact details around a hundred people who wanted more information on Plone... and gave countless demos of Plone to people coming to the stand. That means we spoke to one person about every 4 minutes... no wonder my throat was hoarse by the end!

To get an impression of just how busy it was, here is a time lapse video of the stand from the viewpoint of the two inbuilt cameras on the iMacs we were doing demos on. They are arranged at roughly 90 degree angle to each other with a photo captured every 20 seconds, so you have 3 days of activity on the stand compressed down to nearly two minutes.

So, so long IMS 2009! It was great, and we'll see everyone there next year.

This year we have been representing Plone at the IMS / Online 2009 expo at Earl Court Olympia in London.

After a great start with day one we were back to start day two of the expo. I went over to the venue a bit earlier today for a meeting with Janus Boye of JBoye to talk a bit about the state of Plone and to bounce a quite interesting idea around, which hopefully we will reveal soon.

The main show floor then opened at 10:00 and people started coming to the Plone stand to chat about Plone. I was presenting a talk in one of the show floor lecture theatres on 'The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a Large Corporate Intranet' at 11:15, so Astra and Chris set about wandering the show floor to hand out more flyers we'd created for the show. One side of the flyers was the Flexible Plone advert we created, and the other side some promo about my talk.

My talk was the second talk of the day, and was preceded by a talk entitled 'Moving a large institution to an Open Source WCM system' by Richard Morgan from the Victoria & Albert Museum here in London. His talk focussed on the evaluation and procurement process they went through to eventually end up at a decision to use Squiz's MySource Matrix as a CMS. One of the key points he made was the importance of the relationship between the client and the vendor and how he really enjoyed the 'colocation days' they did (customer sprints in the Plone world). As it happened this turned out to be a great introduction to my talk, which was then taking the Open Source story a bit further and presenting a specific case study of a Plone based intranet for a large client of ours. My talk was packed to capacity with standing room left only, about 60 people in total.

The talk went really very well, and I even managed to keep to time pretty accurately. The talk described the relationship with one of our clients over the past three years and how their initial intranet has grown and evolved over that time to encompass a number of specific business processes.

Following the talk we had a rush on the Plone stand and were doing demos non stop for the next couple of hours until lunch time. As usual I'll be putting a Slidecast of my talk on Slideshare.net as soon as I've edited the audio.

After lunch thing quietened down a bit at the show, but by the end of the day we had handed out about 150 brochures over the first two days and spoken to even more people than we did yesterday.

We did have one quite amusing incident towards the end of the day, where some random guy decided to impart his aged wisdom to us and loudly proclaimed that we needed a 'gobble gobble' machine and needed to buy up all the competing CMS systems in the market (as there are too many to choose from) kill the competitors off and then sell stock options. I think in all his wisdom he had completely missed the point of Open Source. He told us we were wrong and that we needed a USP. I told him our USP was that by being Open Source, companies who spend time and money investing in using Plone as their CMS can rest safe in the knowledge that their CMS won't be bought out by a 'gobble gobble' machine and killed off by someone following his advice. He didn't get it. Oh well. I'm sure he'll catch up with the modern world one day.

Once the show closed at 5pm we headed over to the Hilton next door for the vendors drinks reception and caught up with the Squiz guys for a chat and some beers.

As we were wrapping up for the day, the Gilbane conference in Boston seemed to be revving up to full swing and pics were coming in of the Plone stand there. It was great to see the pic of the stand there and to see the new plone brochures on display. With Thanksgiving just last weekend, Nate, Ken et al must have worked incredibly hard to get them printed in time. As I headed back to my hotel room, checking twitter, a panel discussion between Plone, Drupal, Joomla! and Alfresco was just kicking off... go Plone!

Tomorrow is the last day of both IMS and Gilbane, so if you want to come along and find out more about Plone and you are in either London or Boston then please do come along for a chat.

This year we have been representing Plone at the IMS / Online 2009 expo at Earl Court Olympia in London.

It's the end of the first day of the show, and its been a fantastic day. We arrived yesterday to setup the new Plone stand we've had printed and arranged the stand in a similar fashion to the previous shows we've been to with the big display stand along the back, two iMacs on funky stands either side and a literature stand near the front of the stand. Once again we had a nice corner stand which was open on two sides making it much more accessible and approachable to passers by.

As well as the new stand background, we have produced some new, very sexy, Plone brochures explaining all about Plone (both the software and the community) and Open Source. We've released the brochures under the Creative Commons license so you can download the PDF and the original Adobe InDesign files if you want to modify them.

We also printed up a bunch of information sheets of Plone in specific sectors (Non-profit, Public Sector, Education, Enterprise, NHS) based upon templates supplied by Nate Aune at Jazkarta.

These brochures have already been modified by Nate Aune and Ken Wasetis for use at the Gilbane conference happening at the moment in Boston.

Yes, that's right... running from the 1st - 3rd December Plone is simultaneously being presented at both the IMS / Online 2009 expo in London and the Gilbane 2009 conference in Boston!

Whilst this year there seemed to be a lot fewer visitors in general on the show floor, the IMS conference organisers report a greater number of pre-registrations to last year. We've certainly found that whilst there are less people passing the stand, there have been a greater percentage stopping to chat to us, so in fact I think we've had a more successful first day overall.

Once again, the sheer diversity of people coming to chat to us about Plone has been amazing. We've spoken to a large well known Orchestra, several people from the Ministry of Defence, some medical publishing companies, a university, a society for women in engineering... all of whom have shown fantastic response to Plone. In fact, just 4 minutes after the doors opened to the public this morning, the very first person to come to the stand was from a business school in London who have been using Plone for about 6 years and was saying just how amazing it was.

Another notable thing was the absence of some well known large commercial CMS vendors who I was expecting to see. Jadu, Open Text, Ektron, Fatwire and Percussion were all vendors who were attended last year, but were not here this time. Last year Jadu had an enormous stand visible from almost anywhere on the show floor. Maybe commercial CMS vendors are feeling the pinch this year?

There were a few Open Source systems represented there: Squiz (MySource Matrix) and eZ Systems (eZ Publish), but Plone was the only true community Open Source company represented. Interestingly, compared to last year there were far more people aware of Plone, and far fewer people who said 'We've heard of Drupal and Joomla, what is Plone?'. So I think our attendance at these style of events (both IMS 2008 and Internet World 2009) is showing signs of increasing awareness of Plone. We probably talked to about 80-100 people today and gave demos of Plone to most of them.

I also got a chance to have a good chat with Tony Byrne from CMS watch and have a look at their 2010 Web Content Management report and read the Plone chapter in it. Its pretty complimentary, but there are a few points that need updating in the report so I'll be submitting my feedback to them to hopefully be taken into account for the next update.

Tomorrow morning I'm giving a talk at 11:15 in Theatre A on 'The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a Large Corporate Intranet'. So if you are about in London, go to the IMS website and register for free and come along and say hello.

Last week Netsight were at the Europython 2009 conference in Birmingham, UK. The main reason we were there was to learn about all the cool stuff happening now in the Python world, but we also wanted to promote Plone as well.

To be honest it was a fairly last minute decision as we have just been so busy at Netsight in the past couple of months with client work. Also most of the Netsight team going (Matt, Daniel, Adam, Scott and honorary Netsight member, Dan F) are mainly Python and Zope developers, not really Plone developers. That said, as I've said before, nowadays you don't need to know that much Plone-specific knowledge to be useful in a Plone context, as much of it now is straight forward python development.

The Europython team graciously gave the Plone Foundation a space to have a stand at the conference free of charge. We just needed to bring the materials with us. I wasn't organised enough in time to get any of the bulk order of Plone stickers the foundation had printed up sent over, or get any more printed up locally. We were also traveling by train to Birmingham so didn't want to take too much stuff with us. We mainly took our large vertical Plone banner, a stack of Plone bags, some of the 'Top 15 Questions About Plone' leaflets and some of our Plone brochures with us.

It was actually quite a different feel, as most of the marketing material we've been creating at Netsight for advocating Plone has been aimed at expos such as Internet World, and IMS in which we are competing against a lot of commercial players. As such much of our material was 'preaching to the converted' in terms of 'What is Open Source?' and the likes. For developers at a conference like this I think we really just needed lots of cool schwag to give away. Items like the Six Feet Up Plone bottle openers or t-shirts would have gone down well.

A few people came up to the stand to come talk to us to find out about Plone, and see what it is up to these days, though we didn't get as many as I was expecting. I think most people either 1) know about it 2) think they already know about it ;) or 3) don't care as they use X instead and why would they want to learn about other systems.

There were some other Plone development companies and individuals there, and we had a great Thai dinner one evening with Martijn and Roel from Four Digits and Laurence Rowe from Jarn. We also bumped into quite a few of the usual faces from the Plone and Zope world: Aiste Kesminaite (POV), Kit Blake (Infrae), Martijn Faassen (Startifact), Christian Theune (Gocept), Chris Withers (Simplistix), Christian Scholtz (COM.lounge), Charlie Clark (eGenix).

Next year I want to try an arrange a bigger Plone presence at Europython, as there were actually no talks on Plone at Europython at all this year (versus about 13 that mention Django in their abstract). I especially think a 'State of Plone' talk (like the ones done by Geir Baekholt and Alex Limi at the European and US Plone symposiums) would be a good idea. A tutorial on doing simple pythonic things in Plone such as creating a viewlet in Plone using Grok would be a great way to show the rest of the python community how easy it can be to get involved in Plone these days.

There have also been a great number of tools that have come out of the Zope world, and used extensively by Plone. The most immediately obvious one is buildout, which I think would be a great tool for with wider python community, but most other projects haven't come across it yet. Martijn Faassen did a great talk on 'Things that I helped Create' which was a journey through his life creating things starting as a kid. It was a fantastic insight into the creative process. Alas he ran out of time before he got onto the more recent items, in which he was going to be talking about some of these tools. One of the Four Digits guys was due to do a Lightning Talk too on Plone, but again time ran out before he had his chance.

-Matt

Photo credits: SafPlusPlus and MrTopf