Finally the software has been released. Last year there was a Ploneability High Education event held in November at the University of Houston. I promised a few things during that presentation. We have followed through and I want to explain to the wider community our motivations.

At the Ploneability event I said Desktop 4 would be free. Desktop is now available to download. I also want to highlight some features: decoupled Desktop from Plone, the UI is now mostly asynchronous, fixed tons of bugs. We now feel that Desktop 4 should be widely distributed and urge everyone to use it.

Specific highlights:

• Enfold Desktop no longer requires Plone. The Desktop Server components for CMF/Plone add "more functionality" to the user's experience. Such as workflow control and property sheets. But the server components are no longer required. In this mode Desktop users simply have fewer options. They have a very nice and reliable DAV client that is more predictable than Microsoft Web Folders. You can now use Enfold Desktop with Plone, Zope, CMF, mod_dav, IIS, etc. In fact we urge you to use it on any DAV server!
• Performance. The UI was originally synchronous. This meant you could do one thing at a time. If an operation took a long time (say uploading a 100MB file) your Enfold Desktop would become unresponsive. This is no longer the case. You can upload and download multiple files at once and edit files -- all simultaneously! The user experience is significantly better because of these performance enhancements. Give it a shot and tell us.
• Bug squishing. Not much else I can say. We added a Report a bug feature. Also if desktop does something unexpected it will prompt the user to send us a message (it also sends internal logging). This has helped tremendously. We have uncovered loads of bugs and fixed them. Often bugs that end users were unaware of but were still happening under the covers.

Why we released:

Enfold Systems is very interested in acting as a good community citizen. We believe that Enfold Desktop will enable people to win more consulting projects. If they want support and to remove the ads - they can pay us. But the result is the consulting community is often asked for Windows Desktop integration and there was no de-facto standard. Enfold Desktop aims to be that standard. By having the broadest adoption of Enfold Desktop there will be a coherent Plone / Windows Desktop integration story.

This is only the beginning. We have laid one piece of the foundation. Plone has a complete DAV integration (server and client). But it needs much more. Specifically we need software developers to make their software DAV compliant. This requires the entire community to buy-in. There are many reasons for DAV compliance. One example could be import/export.

An example is having a representation of content outside of the CMS, say in the case of exporting. Also a way to create content by importing this representation. So the import/export story, I believe, could be tied to having a DAV representation for content. Plone still does not have a full import/export story that is 100% textual and independent of the storage medium. Customers want repeatable import/export.

Another could be creating a cross platform editor for content. We now have Enfold Desktop and External Editor. But we can not edit "rich content types". This could be very interesting. Double click on content and have it open up in a rich editor that supported calendar controls. We have a higher level of abstraction other than "File". It would be a pity for everything to be file oriented.

If you do not keep up with IT analysts writings. Plone is the big kid on the block when it comes to Open Source content management. Desktop integration is one facet to CMS. The plone community now has a great foundation to make a much richer experience. And an immediately useful Folder/File-level DAV integration for the Windows Desktop. But it will require more from the community. Specifically users asking product writers to support DAV. Because it is the product aftermarket that makes the Plone CMS so powerful. Commercial CMS's do not have such a flourishing aftermarket. The Plone aftermarket is continually building and sharing 24 hours 7 days per week.

Lastly I would like to clarify Enfold System's position when it comes to open source and Plone. Enfold Systems is the Windows open source content management system specialist. We focus on providing product, services, and integration to organizations that want the power of the open source Plone content management system while reusing their existing Windows infrastructure. This is very important for large organizations. This is our niche. Our customer's want a vibrant community. So as we provide service to a wide variety of organizations from small-medium size non-profits to fortune 100 companies - Enfold Systems is trying to build a sustainable open source model. A part of this manifests in big releases like Enfold Desktop 4 being released. But more often than not you can see aftermarket Plone components such as the magnificent UploadReferenceWidget and the visionary Entransit Content Deployment all the way to unseen bug fixes to Python COM bindings, Zope, and Plone. PLIP 187 is an example of us feeding changes from product development back into Plone proper. Enfold Systems sees releasing Desktop as a way to grow the Plone ecosystem. Also to maintain visibility that Enfold Systems is both the premier Open Source Windows CMS provider and the Plone experts.