Agile Tortoise
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Plone Intranet
After noodling with the setup for the past couple of months in my “spare time”, I’ve finally gone live on a new company Intranet at work, based on Plone. I have high hopes for it becoming more participatory than our previous site, which was Conversant-based.
This has been a difficult process for me as I have a lot of emotional attachment to Conversant, and it’s genuinely great at certain things. There are many convenience-type things that I can do with Conversant that I haven’t found any equivalents for in Plone. But, ultimately, for the purposes of the Intranet, Plone is a better fit. It has an extra UI out of the box, workflow and more granular security. More importantly, is Plone’s ability to deal with different content types.
There’s a lot of overlap in the design ideals in the two products, and I expect if Conversant had the mindshare, funding and number of contributors that Plone has it could really compete with it, but without that mindshare there’s just too much grunt lifting to do. For example, Conversant doesn’t have some of the integration with other services on my network, like SQL dbs and LDAP. It could. But it doesn’t.
I think Seth would like Archetypes and the ZCatalog.
FYI, Conversant’s still a much better Weblogging tool, so don’t expect this site to be Plone-based anytime in the foreseeable future.
