PloneGov
Bernhard Bühlmann, 4teamwork.ch
http://plonegov.ch
Bernhard Bühlmann talks about his experiences of using Plone for projects for the government
Plone is not universally loved (in Switzerland)
- IT departments are not open to Open Source, Plone is seen as a thread
- established companies have a good working lobby
- „nobody ever has been fired for using Oracle/SAP/Microsoft“
- Big projects are put out to tender as WTO project (World Trade Organizing, international tender)
- in Switzerland many people still think that „Open Source == Linux on the desktop“
- Community not big enough, not many agencies are doing it in Switzerland
But: Advantages through Open Source (campaigning by 4teamwork)
- Guerilla Marketing / Networking / Lobbying
- Free available prototypes/applications
- good service package
- Open Source is not main selling point, instead it’s the complete package which counts
- Advantages through Ressource Pooling: Many organisations can join up to create one application together
Why Ressource Pooling?
- no WTO tender necessary as the individual budgets are small enough
advantages for using Plone as base architecture for eGovernment
- They always are searching for alternatives to see if there’s something which is better but so far did not
find any which fits all the requirements - Open Source (GPL)
- there is the Plone Foundation
- framework for web applications of various sorts
ten use cases for eGovernment
- create a library structure
- manage dossiers
- register papers
- create events
- share with some actor
- give out a task and monitor it
- create a document
- organize a meeting
- plan work
- manage time
How they work
- agile software development, thus no big requirements papers in the beginning in order to make projects a success.
- eXtreme Programming
- Sprints (will get better and better after initial problems)
- customers define how the solution should work
- concentrate on the essentials
- don’t reinvent when not necessary (so they are easily updated)
important extensions
- concept of cooperations (via references)
- filter concept (smart folders extensively used)
- CMFSetup
- introduced concept of a Desktop (sort of a home folder, like what is planned for Plone 3)
- PDF-Support (letter, forms, lists) as there’s no paperless office yet
- email archiving (BernMail)
Advantages of Plone (reagarding their clients)
- Live Search
- object oriented DB
- security and role concept (big plus)
- modular approach
- user friendly
- accessibility
- stability, roadmap and community (important for eGovernment)
Disadvantages of Plone
- no good versioning yet (they are using now CMFEditions and iterate)
- external editors has weaknesses (checkout would be good, they maybe want to look into Enfold Desktop)
- storage of big files problematic (might look into Railroad etc.)
- scaleablity (like >400 clients in the intranet accessing simultaneously)
- no connection to MS Exchange
- very complex for newbies
- no the best marketing (compared to Ruby on Rails and Alfresco)