According to the Danish Government, Plone is a good CMS. It seems unfair and unhealthy for competition when the government has a favoured system, whether open source or not, in particular in a marketplace as young and dynamic as the CMS marketplace.
To quote Shakespeare: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark".
The statement on Plone is from the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency, which belongs in the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. You'll find the innocent looking quote as a part of an IT dictionary on their website.
I agree that Plone is a good CMS and I've also previously called Plone a popular open source CMS, but that does not mean I would blindly adopt it for any web project or recommend Plone on any shortlist for a CMS selection. As you probably know, there are many relevant open source alternatives, e.g. Liferay, Typo3 and Umbraco. On the commercial side I compare Plone to Microsoft SharePoint, mainly due to product strengths behind the firewall, in particular with collaboration. Interestingly SharePoint is very popular with government projects, including in Denmark.
For the government based buyer, please remember that the consulting firms with Plone experience tend to be quite small in size. Also, Plone requires Python knowledge for advanced customisation and is known for having a steep learning curve.
There is a potential role for government in this market. What would be very helpful for government buyers are:
- 3 - 5 recommended content management systems with strengths and weaknesses for each CMS when used in particular types of projects
- a listing of unsupported systems and a good reason for why the system is on the list
To be fair, it is an improvement for the Danish government to recommend Plone rather than having a gov't funded proprietary CMS, which was the case back in 2005.
Does your country's government have publicly stated preferences with regards to CMS? If so, what are they?
UPDATE 30 July: Plone has been removed from the IT dictionary
Hi Janus,
Where did they say this? From your paraphrasing, saying that “Plone is a good CMS” is not the same as saying “Plone is a preferred CMS”.
I think Plone is good if it’s a good match for your requirements. A tautology, I know, but I’m sure you’d agree. I know of many government (and non-government) projects that have used Plone successfully.
Plone implementation partners tend to be smaller than specialist vendors for certain large scale commercial products, but there are also some very big companies that sometimes do Plone work (I work for one of them, a Big 4 consulting firm, which does not endorse Plone, but uses it sometimes when the right project calls for it).
Furthermore, it’s not clear why a small vendor is always worse than a big one. I think in many cases, government buyers prefer specialist, local knowledge to big faceless corporations.
As for skills and learning curve – this is very much an “it depends” kind of question again. I think the world has moved on from the point where IT managers thought all software had to be either Java or .NET. The programming language certainly plays only a very small part. Plone is probably harder to learn than some systems, and easier than others, even for people with no Python experience.
Martin
I agree. with your opinion. I own small Plone development company in Japan. But I think the government has to be neutral for any choice. Each CMS has each positive and negative points. The most important thing is to make proper choice of FOSS.
I think that this (original) post is greatly overblown. Stating that Plone is a good CMS is not the same as an endorsement and this post implies there is some glowing endorsement. I agree with all of Martin’s points above.
I developed a CMS and Portals practice for a mid-sized (150+ consultants) IT consultancy in Chicago, IL, USA where we helped (mostly Fortune 500 and large government agencies) clients evaluate CMS tools in a neutral way and then also provided implementation services for various tools and I can say that Plone has plenty of company when it comes to having a learning curve in order to properly implement a CMS. I would include some of the other tools we implemented while I was there: Fatwire, Interwoven, Vignette, and RedDot (these last two are now part of OpenText) as widely used CMS tools with significant learning curves. In IT, typically with power also comes some complexity.
The Python language itself is actually more approachable and less cumbersome than Java, my previous language of choice.
While at this larger consultancy, it became apparent that open source tools greatly caught up to commercial tools in core CMS features and in many cases were pioneering new social and collaborative features that commercial tools are still playing catch-up to integrate into their offerings (things such as wikis, forums, blogs, RSS were integrated into open source CMS tools well before commercial ones.)
While it’s true that a few years ago I did found one of the smaller Plone integration firms you refer to, we still provide services as subcontractors through much larger consultancies that large corporations and government agencies use and I can tell you that Plone is used by most branches of the U.S. military as well as many of the intelligence industry aparatus and is greatly respected for its security, workflow, version control, accessibility/standards compliance, and ease of use.
This approach of having the ‘Big 4′ agencies and the like leveraging smaller firms that are experts is not something specific to open source. Try to find a large firm that has its own on-staff consultants that are experts with commercial apps such as Informatica, Cognos, or Peoplesoft’s Balanced Scorecard decision support applications. They turn to small niche vendors for these things generally.
I think it’s great that my government is making optimal use of tax payer dollars by turning to open source solutions where it makes sense, and I agree that such agencies should not publicly ‘endorse’ any certain tool.
At the same time, I think it’s important for government transparency that such agencies should publicly divulge which systems they are using for applications such as managing an agency’s public website and other non-secretive applications, but it’s tough to get government agencies to do this in the U,S.
So, while I don’t believe there should be endorsements of applications, I think it’s fine and even preferred in order to keep governments accountable that they report as much as possible which systems they are purchasing licenses and/or servies to implement.
The government statement you refer to implies neither an endorsement nor use of a particular system to me, but if it were to be an endorsement, I think you would have a good bone to pick.
Regards,
Ken
You raise an excellent point that it is very hard for governments to balance the need to be seen to be fair with other concerns. However they, like all big organisations need to be efficient. Efficiency means standardising on few platforms so as to gain economies of scale. Choosing an open source platform makes a lot more sense than standardising on a proprietary technology where there is less opportunity for a large client like the government to have an influence on its direction and timeliness of patches etc.
Plone is, in our opinion, the most enterprise grade of the truly open source CMS’s which is why it’s our technology of choice an increasing number of governments are choosing it.
Version2, a Danish IT online magazine, featured this story on 3 August. See http://www.version2.dk/artikel/11661-it-og-telestyrelsen-anbefalede-cms-ved-en-fejl (in Danish)
In the article a representative from the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency is quoted saying that “recommending Plone was a mistake”. The favourable Plone entry has since been removed from the IT dictionary.
In Denmark it seems we have about 20 experienced Plone consultants, which are divided among 2 consultancies with less than 10 employees and then some freelancers.
I like open source and also have a very good impression of Plone, but at least for a Danish buyer, I would say that the lack of experienced implementation partners is a weakness for Plone.
[...] Is Plone a Good CMS? by Janus Boye: Janus is definitively one of the best cms consultants I know, but please read also the excellent comment to his post. [...]
It seems that many comments on the “weaknesses” or strengths of Plone as compared to proprietary CMS Portal software are not based on the products themselves – for example, as to their implementation and adherence to various WEB/networking, and accessibility/access control and other Open Standards, etc., but rather on “intangible” qualities like an unqualified assessment as to the level of support and quantity of ‘professional’ support entities supposedly unavailable.
These arbitrary judgments usually hide some aspect of prejudice of one solution over another, and in many cases is based solely on what one technology one is proficient at and/or what financial benefit one gains from preferring or advancing one solution over another.
Statements like Python requiring a “steep learning curve” have no basis in fact, when expressly compared to development environments such as .Net/C# and Java, at least not according to all the senior programming professionals with whom I converse in companies/organizations like IBM, Google, Oracle or NASA research here in USA.
W. Anderson
wanderson@kimalcorp.org
I think the main challenge for everybody deciding what CMS is the right one is:
You start with some requirements, setup your choosen CMS and your users start adding content … but over time you or the users realize new needs and they start requesting modifications & more important extensions to address new challenges unseen at the beginning of the project … and of course it has to be secure under all circumstances … well there is by now a growing network of Plone consulting firms. You’ll find them @ plone.net & http://www.zeapartners.org/partners/view_all
Just working with Plone for a year now I can witness that the learning curve for Plone was steep (because I had started too late with Martin Aspeli’s book), but not for Python. Finally any new area of expertise which have to manage complexity in order to address complex problems has in one way or another a steep learning curve. This is not bad in itself, if the results are worth it. And hey for Plone/Zope/Python it is definitely worth it, because your capabilities are an order of magnitude better afterwards …