Novell OpenCourseWare is one more Novell's a plone-powered site, it is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. OpenCourseWare represents a major open access effort and is supported by educational institutions such as MIT, Harvard Law School, Utah State University, as well as Novell, Inc.

The Chief Executives Board (CEB) furthers coordination and cooperation on a whole range of substantive and management issues facing United Nations system organizations. CEB brings together on a regular basis the executive heads of the organizations of the United Nations system, under the chairmanship of the Secretary General of the United Nations.

United Nations System site is bilingual - a visitor has a choice to switch between English and French languages.

Quim Gil Hoernecke mentions in one of his blogs that  after a lot of discussion and reviewing,  Plone seemed to be the most appropriate CMS for the revamped www.gnome.org here and now.

The reasons for choosing Plone rely more on people than code, since both tools (The second option in this tight final was Midgard, the CMS powered with GNOME libraries) could reach all the requirements with hacking and good will.

Three other candidates were dismissed previously and we needed very good arguments to do so. The localization recommendations made by the GNOME i18n team were crucial in the selection. See why not TikiWiki and why not eZ Publish or Drupal. Something learned in detail during this process is that apparently simple tools can match your requirements if you have the knowledge and the resources to do so. At the end this is a reason why we love free software so much.

Salesforce.com is the proven leader in on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM). They  deliver the most innovative technology and make it as easy as possible to share and manage business information. Their solutions combine award-winning functionality, proven integration, point-and-click customization, global capabilities, and the best user experience — and the result is CRM success. That's why Salesforce has earned the trust of its customers — and a customer satisfaction rate of over 97% — along with top industry honors.
Plone is the leading Content Management System for the award-winning Zope application server. Supported by thousands of developers from around the world, it is one of the most sophisticated, popular, and easy to use Enterprise Content Management Systems on the market today.

It will undoubtfully bring benefits to both of the industrial giants If these two integrate. Plone and Salesforce.com both do have unbeliavably strong communities behind them and lots of fantastic perspectives ahead. Both are widely used in the nonprofit sector — and beyond. And both have all the features needed for across-the-internet integration.

The results of such an integration, according to Steve Andersen, will be the following:

• Someone who signs up for your Plone website will be automatically dropped into your Salesforce.com database

• Any data you collect (interest area, newsletter signup, etc.) on your website will be recorded in Salesforce.com

• You can use all that data, and the constituent’s email address, to drive communication through any number of email marketing services that integrate with Salesforce.com
• If you desire, you can allow your constituents to view and change the data you have in Salesforce.com.
  

"The Salesforce.com foundation, and the corporate developer's I've talked with, have been real supporters of open source stuff. I think they feel a real kinship because of the open API concepts. Except for Salesforce.com and a few other companies, most people doing open API work have been giving it away. Whatever the reason, they've been really down with open source projects."

Python for Series 60 brings the power and productivity of the Python programming language to the Series 60 platform. The tools enable rapid application development and prototyping, and the ability to create stand-alone Series 60 applications written in Python.
The device installation package includes the Python interpreter (based on Python 2.2.2), select Python Standard Libraries, a script shell for launching Python scripts, a variety of native extensions, and a Python Console for interactive development. Python for Series 60 can also be added to Series 60 SDK's for PC-based development, testing, and creating application installers.

I cannot adequately express how thoroughly I enjoyed meeting you all at the Plone conference this week in Vienna.  As Imentioned to some of you, after 7 years at Microsoft, I was a bit skeptical a year ago when my colleagues told me that they were to build eduCommons on Plone, Zope and Python.

Well, if I ever had any doubts, after this week, they are now vapor. What a beautiful and vibrant community you have developed.  I truly hope this is not my last Plone conference. You have all been so incredibly gracious....and you folks at Blue Dynamics are amazing. Thank you for hosting such a delightful event.

Meeting in Vienna was a real pleasure in numerous ways - one of them being to see this community so well-organized about

the priority of ensuring the Future Of Plone, and taking more professional/pragmatic approach to marketing it henceforth.

 I've got to get up to speed on all the good stuff that's been done to date, esp that which arose out of New Orleans

symposium (/me scours list for mention of Peronal Ad campaign discussed), but this is just to give pointage to that

reference i made concerning Product Vision Statement (f.k.a. Unique Selling Proposition, back in the day ;-).

The 2005 Plone conference was very interesting and educational with a lot of good energy and comments on GoldEgg. The Goldegg initiative was mentioned in all the key notes delivered by  Alan Runyan(Plone), Jim Fulton(Zope3) and Tres Seaver(CMF).

It was a great success.  After the conference several of the key developers then went on to the Castle Sprint at the Goldegg castle in Austria.  Thanks to Phillip for his incredible hospitality!  By providing with this incredible environment, our work is that much better.

The people, the speakers, the organization, the venue, and the tone all added up to a really special experience. This  conference had a tangible, gratifying vibe that seemed to put a sublime smile on everybody's face.

• Joel Burton's talk on Best Practices was very concise and practical, I was, however surprised at how much of the stuff I already knew and practiced myself until it hit me: Andi had just visited last year's Plone Conference just prior to him and I collaborating on the DirecType site during which he had infused me with those very practices. Looking back from this perspective I'm really impressed with how Andi picked this stuff up so fast and passed it on - at the time I had the impression that he had been doing it like that for years ;-) The one thing from Burt's talk that was new to me and might prove really useful was his plug for WingIDE as a debugging tool. I'm downloading the free trial, as I'm writing this and will report back once I've taken it for a spin.
• The Apple Hardware percentage here is really remarkable. The best thing about it (to me) is that the Mac users here are usually not the typical Mac User but in most cases (so I assume) converted Linux users and it's quite refreshing to see Macs being used in a UNIX way rather than just as a Web-, Office- and Graphicsplatform.
• If you leave the (new) default behaviour of Plone 2.1 to not enabling editing of short names off it will rename the (initially cryptic) short name to a websafe version of the object's Title - neat! (This makes especially for very "pretty" multilingual URLs).
• ATCT have become ridiculously rich and comfortable. Martin Aspeli's tutorial had me positively drooling! In case you're a Plone Developer/User and haven't seen his presentation - I do realize, that some of the readers of this blog are actually not at the conference ;-) you owe it to yourself to check out his RichDocument tutorial at plone.org which he based his talk on.

• Jerry McRea is a mind reader and wrote a tool for managing and creating Zope instances pretty much precisely to my specifications without me ever having told anybody ;-) One thing however is crucially absent: a script-based viable backup strategy. But at least now I have a good base onto which to add such a strategy ;-)

• Opera seems to be a viable alternative for my mail- and news requirements. Who'd've thunk it? After a 15 minute lunchtable evangelism session by limi I'm actually going to give it a try. (According to rumours, Opera also contains a web browser).

• LinguaPlone and Members folders don't mix. You might want to consider abandoning Members folders in any Plone instance that you run with LP - most use cases of Plone don't really call for those folders anyway.

• PloneOntology could be really interesting for managing the articles on ds.ccc.de - once I've actually got it up and running ;-)

• educ()ommons is also something to watch out for. "An OpenCourseWare Management System designed specifically to support OpenCourseWare projects like MIT OCW and USU OCW". To quote John Dehlin (he's here at the conference): "it's all about sharing university learning materials with the world--openly, and freely (think people in India, or China, or South America, or even the rural UK, having access to learning materials never before possible)". A commendable effort - If you're in education check it out
• I met Florian Schulz and he explained to me the workings of the new Ressource Registry and I had a very con- and instructive chat with Geir Bækholt (author of LinguaPlone) and will now finally move ahead and make my own site multilingual using his advice.

I think the Plone sites webpage needs to accomplish two related-but-not-identical objectives:
1) Provide a short listing of “reference” Plone-powered websites — 20 or 30 sites that showcase the very best of what Plone can do, across a wide variety of organizations and site goals. These listings would ideally include fleshed-out case studies on the Plone site.
2) Provide a canonical listing (and count) 0f all Plone-powered sites. This is important to establish Plone’s market/mind share in a crowded CMS marketplace, and to attract developers to the Plone/Zope platform.

Proposal I propose the creation of two new content types for Plone.org:
1) PloneCaseStudy
2) PloneSiteListing

The Goldegg funding initiative has a few basic goals. First, Goldegg should strengthen the existing stack by funding the medium-term activities that don't usually get funded: planning, coordination, etc. As an example, Zope Corporation very generously pays for Jim Fulton to act in this role for Zope 3, with the result being technical coherency and clarity in decision-making.

Second, Goldegg should improve the stack relations by getting the stack leaders to work together during the same release cycle. This includes funding for sprints which provide face-to-face time. With this, development that would be best done at a lower stack layer might be done there more frequently.

Third, Plone should get a convincing response to the "What about Zope 3?" question.

Fourth, Plone should improve the issue raised by Alan regarding "Plone-the-Product" (PtP) and "Plone-the-framework" (PtF). The Plone project should grow new framework only when it can't reasonably be done at the CMF, Five/Z3, or Python layers. Goldegg tries to get the key players together on a near-term, fast-payback progress towards coordinated releases.

The purpose of the first Goldegg funding initiative is to speed the adoption of Zope 3 technology into the CMF and Plone. Goldegg One is focused on the next release cycle of CMF (CMF 2.0) and Plone (Plone 2.2), thus keeping its scope in check. However, the deliverables will come about by working more closely the CMF, using the license of the CMF, and helping the key players of the CMF with the roadmap.

Zope 3 holds much promise as an improved application server framework. Thanks to the "Five" project, this promise is available in Zope 2 applications and is now standard with Zope 2.8. Thus, existing applications can use Zope 3 technologies without a full rewrite. Both Plone and CMF can benefit from Five. Both have Five-related roadmap items with high payback and low disruption. Also, the Z3 architecture gives Plone and CMF a chance to avoid spawning new mini-frameworks, such as event models.

The pleasures of Plone

Learning to use the CMS was initially a very frustrating experience, but no different than learning any new ICT application. For example, when using the WYSIWYG editor, copying in text from Word documents can sometimes lead to muddled formatting, but this is something that is learned, anticipated, and then becomes less of a difficulty. I got a great deal of CMS practice working through the entire site at the time of launch in late March 2005 (having put this off until the final deadline approached).

The system becomes increasingly intuitive with practice, and the user interface is logical, with options to view, edit and publish pages. We have built a publishing workflow into the CMS, enabling authors to create content and publishers to review and publish. Thus far, we have not rolled out the CMS to a wide number of staff, but our site, like our organisation is relatively small.

Why Use Plone for this Project?

There was a time when open source software was viewed with some suspicion. Nowadays it is widely accepted that, with a worldwide development community behind it, open source software is often better that its proprietary equivalent and it is routinely used by health authorities, government departments and other large organizations.

A major factor in deciding to use Plone for this project is the flexibility it brings - putting a website into Plone renders every page editable, which means that it is free to grow in any direction the client chooses, unconstrained by foresight or technology. In addition, and like all good content management systems, the use of Plone forces a separation between content and style - the content is drawn into the Plone page template and displayed according to its associated style sheets.

This latter point was particularly important because the BPMA was preparing to implement its new public brand while the CMS website was being developed. By using Plone we could get on with building the website and add the new branding later. This avoiding interrupting the site's availability to the public, and at no greater cost than if structure and style had been developed simultaneously.

Another factor in the decision was more personal: for some time I had been researching the requirements for a new CMS that I would design, and that the ATL in-house team would build. My new CMS would be a universally accessible and usable vision of beauty, capable of letting anybody edit any website quickly and easily, it would be perfectЕ I felt this was within ATL's very strong capabilities, until I discovered Plone. I was so impressed by what Plone could offer that I abandoned the idea of a new CMS, and decided to join the open source movement.