I just got off the phone with a potential client.  And we told him our soonest availability and he chuckled.  He said that every Plone consulting firm he spoke with has the same problem!  Wow.  This is fantastic news.  I've heard similiar remarks from Plone consulting firms that I speak with on a daily basis.  In fact its not only that Zope/Plone are doing alright - I believe its clear (to all firms) there is steep upward trend.  Firms are drowning in work!  What a great problem to have!!

     On other news we are about to release our final RC for Enfold Desktop!  You can keep informed by signing up to the desktop mailing list.

     Lastly dont forget to sign up for the Plone Conference in Seattle!  There are FIVE tracks!  Can you believe that?  This conference will be a real challenge to one up in the 2007.

As a relative newbie to the world of Plone & Zope, I found Martijn Faassen's talk "Zope in Perspective" a great introduction to the past, present and future of the Zope community.  It's always great to hear the oral history of our community summed up so eloquently (and humorously!).

Big props to Christian "Mr. Topf" Scholz for videotaping the session.  (More video here.)

Technorati Tags: plone zope

I just received an interesting question about the upcoming Plone Conference 2006 and corresponding sprint, which I wasn't entirely certain how to answer.  In a nutshell, it was whether our very own Mr. Topf would be en route to Seattle with video camera for conference and sprint. 

While we don't yet quite have the registration numbers to do professional quality video (go register to make it happen will ya?), it appears that Mr. Topf is on the participants list, which should hopefully lead to some nice video coverage of the events.

This is also more of a general call for anyone else that is currently or is interested in doing this type of conference and sprint coverage.   Why not build the buzz around what should be a fantastic event? 

I know you, you, and one of you all have produced nice stuff in this genre of work.  So feel free to bring your camera, mics, and editing software to Seattle in October!

There was a fantastic, in-depth story in eWeek today about University of North Carolina School of Medicine's adoption of Plone as their course materials management system, and featuring the work of CIGNEX and Kapil Thangavelu.

Some of the key 'grafs...

Open-source didn't have a starring role at UNC until Plone came along:

"We really never had a large open-source solution before. UNC-Chapel Hill widely uses proprietary software solutions. Education has been slower to adopt open source," Hitlin said. Therefore, open source was not a clear path two years ago when the OIS began evaluating its options, he said.

Plone blew away both commercial and open-source competition:

[UNC] considered both commercial and open-source content management software. The committee evaluated Vignette's Vignette and Oracle's Oracle Portal, which was attractive since the SOM [School of Medicine] already used an Oracle database as its back end....

Plone could be adapted to fit UNC's specific business requirements:

All first- and second-year students attend the same courses at the same time. Each course typically is taught by a number of different professors and clinicians, rather than one instructor. According to Hitlin, if customization was going to be a large part of the project, the CMS committee reasoned, why not go with an open-source version so that, at least, the code would be free? That way, the SOM could devote its limited resources to development and implementation.

Plone's active local user communities were a huge win:

The Chapel Hill area has an active Plone user group, which was an advantage. Since the SOM was in the process of building up its developer staff after a few cutbacks, the committee believed it would not be difficult to find people with Plone skills in the area.

Some problems with highly proprietary hardware cropped up:

[T]he project team got an unpleasant surprise when it installed the application on one of the SOM's Sun Microsystems' Solaris SPARC boxes.

"As soon as we installed the application locally, we saw significant latency—10 seconds to load a page, where it had been 1 second in the development environment. It turned out the SPARC hardware doesn't run Python efficiently," Hitlin said.

Cignex advised the SOM to run the open Plone application on inexpensive Linux boxes, which would run a reasonable $2,000 to $3,000 each. But, according to Hitlin, the SOM's system support group was accustomed to supporting the Sun Solaris architecture and was reluctant to add a new platform to the mix.

But in the end, Plone's usability saved the day:

During June and July of 2005, the team dealt with last-minute bug fixes and user training, which turned out to be trivial, according to Hitlin and Thangavelu. The faculty members intuitively understood the user interface and took charge of updating their course materials with ease.

Kudos to CIGNEX and Kapil for doing high-quality, high-visibility work, and showing that Plone is serious software for solving real-world content management problems.

Technorati Tags: plone unc python

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an olpc developer board, and have spent a little time learning about the platform and project.

While there are a few issues I have with the project, it is really an thrilling moment in educational technology and after holding the hardware in my own hands I actually believe this vision might truly manifest. The main reason I am writing about this in the Plone blog is I have learned that the olpc's application development language of choice is Python!

Sheckitout.

While Plone itself is probably not well suited for the laptop itself -- The Laptop's hardware characteristics are closer to a pda w/ a big screen than a MacBook Pro  (plone-on-a-stick? maybe it could ship on a thumbnail drive), it is easy to imagine communities of practice emerging around this platform. Places where educators and students alike can share tips and tricks, strategies and pitfalls. Who will be their dotmac?

Admittedly, these devices are being built to operate unconnected to the Internet, communicating with each other through ad-hoc mesh networks (presence will be a very low level primitive in this environment, and all applications will have access to it), there may still be a role for a server w/in the network.

I don't know exactly how Plone fits into the larger OLPC strategy, but I get the sense that with all the momentum and capital around this project, if Plone gets there lots of people will see it. And many of them may be the next generation of Python/Plone developers.