From the Collective

Dissecting how the CMS market is dissected

2005-12-12T01:02:00.000-08:00

CMSWatch has an in-depth treatment of Stellent and its CMS suite available.

Nevertheless, smaller ECM suite vendors continue to thrive. For example, Eden Prairie, MN-based Stellent is easily the smallest of the pack in terms of annual revenues ($106 million in fiscal year 2005), yet it continues to make plenty of RFP shortlists and win its fair share of deals.

As such, Stellent appears positioned just slightly above where we want to be positioned -- on the boundary between WCM and enterprise CMS. Tony's in-depth review helps tip us off to what the industry analysts thinks is and isn't important in a package. Both the commodity stuff that you need but don't get credit for, as well as the shiny chrome that differentiates.

Of course there are others who think that "enterprise" is the magic word to add in front of your product name. But note the license revenues from Stellent -- $106M last year. In the upper part of the mid-tier, consulting revenue is around 3x license revenue, from what I've been told. If the 2005 market size for Plone consulting is $300M, then we're in good shape.

Plone makes EContent 100

2005-11-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

Via Jeff Potts' weblog post, EContent Magzine has posted EContent 100, their annual list of "…companies that matter most in the digital content industry." Congratulations to Plone for making it on the shortlist in the CMS category.

3 Plone heros, week of Nov 14 05

2005-11-22T23:23:00.000-08:00

We've recently had a big surge of activity and volunteerism in Ploneland. Last week saw 3 folks in particular that deserve recognition for their work.

The biggest props by far go to Wichert Akkerman, who is almost single-handedly conquering the most dire beast in Ploneland: admin stuff. He is migrating the computers for the various plone.org services, migrating the software and the site, setting up common authentication across services, installing Trac, etc. He gave a progress report last week and manages an infrastructure team page which shows that a lot of work is already closed. This is all work nobody else wanted to do and Wiggy is not just maintaining it, but making everything significantly better. He's the Plone Hero of the week.

Honorable mention goes to Rob Miller for his involvement in getting the Z3/Five stack into CMF 2. Specifically, Rob is working on backporting some stuff to CMF 1.6, in addition to his work on CMF 2 and Plone 2.x. Most importantly, Rob (and Whit) are taking the time to explain to other on the plone-dev mailing list what this all means.

Final mention goes to Sidnei da Silva for his work on multiple reindexing in Archetypes. It feels like people have complained about this for a thousand years, and the solution was always, "We'll fix this when we first make the hammer factory factory factory. Sidnei was convinced it wouldn't require some total rewrite of the universe, so he started writing tests, and dove into the code on a pretty crappy mission.

In fact, these three Plone Heros of the week are each recognized for doing some grungy, crummy work. Know of somebody doing Plone janitor tasks that deserves recognition? Comment on this article and lemme know.

Talkin' 'bout Plone and the Plone Foundation

2005-11-21T22:24:00.000-08:00

Joel and I are sharing this blog as a venue for talking about policy and happenings in the Plone Foundation and Plone. Our goal is to improve communication about what's going on at the PF and issues that are on the radar.