This year we have been representing Plone at the IMS / Online 2009 expo at Earl Court Olympia in London.
After a great start with day one we were back to start day two of the expo. I went over to the venue a bit earlier today for a meeting with Janus Boye of JBoye to talk a bit about the state of Plone and to bounce a quite interesting idea around, which hopefully we will reveal soon.
The main show floor then opened at 10:00 and people started coming to the Plone stand to chat about Plone. I was presenting a talk in one of the show floor lecture theatres on 'The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a Large Corporate Intranet' at 11:15, so Astra and Chris set about wandering the show floor to hand out more flyers we'd created for the show. One side of the flyers was the Flexible Plone advert we created, and the other side some promo about my talk.
My talk was the second talk of the day, and was preceded by a talk entitled 'Moving a large institution to an Open Source WCM system' by Richard Morgan from the Victoria & Albert Museum here in London. His talk focussed on the evaluation and procurement process they went through to eventually end up at a decision to use Squiz's MySource Matrix as a CMS. One of the key points he made was the importance of the relationship between the client and the vendor and how he really enjoyed the 'colocation days' they did (customer sprints in the Plone world). As it happened this turned out to be a great introduction to my talk, which was then taking the Open Source story a bit further and presenting a specific case study of a Plone based intranet for a large client of ours. My talk was packed to capacity with standing room left only, about 60 people in total.
The talk went really very well, and I even managed to keep to time pretty accurately. The talk described the relationship with one of our clients over the past three years and how their initial intranet has grown and evolved over that time to encompass a number of specific business processes.
Following the talk we had a rush on the Plone stand and were doing demos non stop for the next couple of hours until lunch time. As usual I'll be putting a Slidecast of my talk on Slideshare.net as soon as I've edited the audio.
After lunch thing quietened down a bit at the show, but by the end of the day we had handed out about 150 brochures over the first two days and spoken to even more people than we did yesterday.
We did have one quite amusing incident towards the end of the day, where some random guy decided to impart his aged wisdom to us and loudly proclaimed that we needed a 'gobble gobble' machine and needed to buy up all the competing CMS systems in the market (as there are too many to choose from) kill the competitors off and then sell stock options. I think in all his wisdom he had completely missed the point of Open Source. He told us we were wrong and that we needed a USP. I told him our USP was that by being Open Source, companies who spend time and money investing in using Plone as their CMS can rest safe in the knowledge that their CMS won't be bought out by a 'gobble gobble' machine and killed off by someone following his advice. He didn't get it. Oh well. I'm sure he'll catch up with the modern world one day.
Once the show closed at 5pm we headed over to the Hilton next door for the vendors drinks reception and caught up with the Squiz guys for a chat and some beers.
As we were wrapping up for the day, the Gilbane conference in Boston seemed to be revving up to full swing and pics were coming in of the Plone stand there. It was great to see the pic of the stand there and to see the new plone brochures on display. With Thanksgiving just last weekend, Nate, Ken et al must have worked incredibly hard to get them printed in time. As I headed back to my hotel room, checking twitter, a panel discussion between Plone, Drupal, Joomla! and Alfresco was just kicking off... go Plone!
Tomorrow is the last day of both IMS and Gilbane, so if you want to come along and find out more about Plone and you are in either London or Boston then please do come along for a chat.