Blog

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.