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Yesterday was World Plone Day, a series of events held around the globe to promote Plone and Open Source in general. In my role as one of the directors of the Plone Foundation I was kindly invited by Jonathan Camilleri Bowman of 2i Ltd to come and present at their World Plone Day event in Valletta, Malta. Needless to say, it was an offer I jumped at, as it was a chance to visit Malta, somewhere I've never been before, but also a chance to see how Plone was being used by a central government.

Malta is an interesting place with a mix of Mediterranean and British cultures. They drive on the correct side of the road (left), their road signs are in English, and their buses and lorries all beautiful old vintage British Leylands, Bristols and AECs. And yet, their buildings are all low, limestone rendered structures, many only half finished in that typical relaxed Mediterranean style. There are something like 360 churches across the island, wherever you are you can see one. Oh, and the sun shines and of course there are beaches everywhere. Maltese is a mix of Arabic and Italian.. with smatterings of pretty much every other language in there. As Jonathan told me: 'Pretty much everyone has invaded Malta at some time'.

Today Malta has a population of about 400,000 people (approx the same size as the city of Bristol) and its main industries are shipping (many large container ships stop to refuel and reload here), finance and tourism. Since Malta joined the EU in 2004, it has been seen as a very favorable location for business due to its adoption of the Euro, its official second language of English, and its welcoming tax rates.

The World Plone day event organised by 2i was aimed specifically at the public sector here in Malta, and was held in the Chamber of Commerce in the capitol city of Valetta. There were both delegates and speakers from various government departments, including the opening address by Mr Claudio Grech chairman of MITA, the Malta Information Technology Agency. MITA is the prime agency appointed by the government to implement ICT on its behalf and reports directly to the Minister of Communications.

I was presenting two talks, one a case study on the Kent Connects Portals project, and talking about their Open Source 'journey' starting with discovering Plone and using it out of the box, through to engaging 3rd party support and development as the project grew. The second talk I did was on the Plone Community -- one of Plone's great strengths. I covered the vast array of support out their available for Plone from one-to-one training, to conferences, sprints, Plone Bootcamps, books, irc channel etc. When I was first proposing my talk, I was a bit worried I wouldn't have enough material to cover half an hour of a talk, but once you look at how wide the community is and what is going on, you realise just how much support for Plone there is out there. Of course, I also covered the Plone Foundation and its role within the community to promote and protect Plone and offer some of the aspects that many Open Source projects lack, such as marketing support, legal help and trademark protection.

There were also talks by Mr Michel Bugeja from the Government Enterprise Architecture Unit and from Mr Cedric Mallia of the Government Quality Assurance Unit talking about Plone and Open Source respectively. Every single government IT project has to pass through these two departments to be vetted, so to have representatives from both of them speaking at this event shows very strong support for both Plone and Open Source in general in Malta. Mr Karl Pullicino presented a case study of Plone's use in the Office of the Prime Minister.

The total attendance was about 70 people, an amazing turn out for such a targeted event. My hat goes off to 2i's team in organising this, I know I might struggle to get 70 government officials to attend a Plone seminar in London, let alone such a compact country as Malta.

The evening before, Jonathan had been telling me of the dominant position of Microsoft in the country. Every student can buy the entire Microsoft suite including tools such as Visual Studio for about GBP 7. And as you'd might expect the majority of the systems in government are based on Microsoft technologies. Earlier in the day, he pointed out Paul Allen's yacht, Octopus, in the bay dwarfing the battlements and stone walls surrounding it. Hrmm....

This however makes it all the more interesting to see Plone being used in such a Microsoft-centric environment. Many people still believe that Open Source and proprietary software are mutually exclusive in an organisation. At a conference I was at in Manchester earlier in the month, Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer commented on how he never understood people when they said 'We don't use Open Source, we are a Microsoft shop'. Surely people should be using the most appropriate tools for the job?

2i is a very good example of using the best tools for the job. They have historically been a 'Microsoft shop' and are a Microsoft Certified (soon to be Gold) Partner, and they develop in some of the most traditional bastions of commercial software, the likes of business intelligence and reporting. Yet when looking at content management, they got tired of not being able to do what they wanted with Sharepoint and started to look around and found Plone. Plone has offered them a way to provide the functionality that their clients need regardless of the platform or existing technologies they are using.

After the WPD event and a quick tour around Malta, I was invited by Michel Bugeja along to a Plone users group hosted by MITA at their offices. Again, a very well attended event with about 20 people from MITA there to discuss specific questions about Plone. Topics ranged from load balancing, and setting up a ZEO cluster behind a Microsoft ISA server, integration with Malta's central authentication, aggregating searches from external systems and communicating via SOAP to other .NET systems. There were also questions about more community oriented aspects of Plone, such as how to go about finding others interested in what you might be developing and how to release a product you have developed into the community.

So the end result was an amazing couple of events in Malta, really showing a lot of support for Plone and showing it in use at the national government level. I'm looking forward to seeing, and hopefully be involved in, Plone's use increasing even further both in Malta, in the UK and of course across the globe. After all... that what we set out to achieve with World Plone Day.