So, hello, I'm Alexander Lechl. I'm trying, well, not to rant too much but, well, I'm

a German, it's, if a German could not rant, something goes wrong. I want to talk about how Plone competes in business. So, from the other perspective than a vendor or an integrator that works with Plone, I'm a decision maker but on that we'll be later. First, which

is the best content management system? Well, it depends. Why it depends? It's very simple

because it depends on the perspective of the user. If the user has requirements that could be fulfilled by a system, then it's fine. If it could not be fulfilled by the system, it's not fine and it has to come everything together. Sometimes the infrastructure that

would be underlined doesn't matter for them. How many personnel do they have? Sometimes if they do not have enough personnel, they probably choose a commercial system because

they believe that there is better support of it. There's also the idea of cost. If you choose open source, it does not mean that it's for free. Open source has its own costs and you should be aware of it and it sometimes really depends on how much time

you have to implement the system. Well, why I do this? I'm a department head of a German university. The NMU is currently the German university with the most students. In my position,

I'm more a manager and a decision maker, not a developer anymore. And from this point, I have to know what different content management systems do and should be able to compare and

choose the right one for us. Why the right one for us? Well, at the moment, the NMU does not use Plone. It uses an old property systems from a company called Infopark. The

system is called Fiona. It is not or it's on the end of its lifetime, so we are trying to choose a new system. And well, my belief is Plone is one of the best content management

system for that case and for our university. But I also see that there are a lot of political questions I have to answer and I want to give that question back to the community because then they could see what they need to do better marketing to solve Plone

to institutions like us. And we are not a small institution. At the moment, we have around about 700 portals, around about 600,000 individual sites that we are serving. We

have at the moment only less than 1% of our users that we expect to work with our web system as authors. It's approximately 2,000 authors. And I guess if we introduce

next year an intranet, it will increase massively. Well, if we look at Plone as a vendor, Plone has a roadmap. Plone has a strategy how they will evolve in the next

few years. And there's one thing where in the roadmap that says what's the focus of Plone. Plone is a general purpose web content management often used to create and manage public websites, intranets, and extranets. And it's best on complex

duration and cost terms. Well, but back on wider scope, if we choose a content

management systems, it depends sometimes, is it or will we be able to buy a system or did we choose open source? Well, open source matters especially for universities. It's the same belief as in science. If we do not have the system, the code of it,

we could not look at it. We could not work with it. We could not share it. A scientist publicates and the thing is that open source is treated like commercial

software by federal acquisition regulations. So those question and answer is from the frequently asked question of the Department of Defense of the United States explaining

that open source has to be treated as commercial off-the-shelf software. And it does not really make a difference. And that's why we as a community should not

only look at open source competitors. We also have to look at commercial competitors. But who are our competitors? Well, there are different approaches. We can go just over the market share. If we look on the market share, well, WordPress is the dominating

system in the web now. Well, does that mean that WordPress is the right system for everything? Definitely not. WordPress is a very good blogging platform but it's not an enterprise

content management system. Well, it's sad to see that Plone is just here with a very, very small market share. But well, market share is calculated by searching of the

meter tag generator. A lot of Plone instances are intranets, are secured pages or even on public websites like FBI or CAA, the government, the generator tag is tripped out.

Well, there are other ways to see who are our competitors. The Real Story Group always published once a year a technology vendor map saying which are the important players

in which sector. So we should then look at our competitors on the road. So Plone says itself it is a web content management. So we have maybe to look all other systems up on the blue

line to see what they are doing and where are they better than us and what can we learn from them or where are we better and can explain that for our users. Another thing is for us or for me as a university man to say or to look at what does my competitors

use. So that's the market share of the CMS used by the German universities was just an evaluation done in March this year and we see Type 3 is the dominating system in Germany.

Well, it's interesting that Drupal is not on that slide because Drupal does not has any market or huge market share in Germany. Well, if we compare to all universities,

well, for all universities that does not fit. We are the largest ones so we compare with other large ones. So the German U15, the association of 15 large and research intensive German universities and the German Institute of Technologies, so that's maybe the educational

power of Germany. What they use? There we see Type 3 is still the leading system but Plone is

almost everywhere number two or three. Well, indeed with Infopark it most often has the same market share but Infopark the system is dying so that doesn't matter. Well, but even then we look

at what's the most or the best universities in Germany. So there was an election of the elections initiative and that's the universities that's the strongest in research and that's how

the president, the vice presidents and the chancellors of university decides on to whom we compare. They do not look at web pages or something, they just think about

research and teaching. So look at this. Well, Plone and Fiona is still the same level but not the leading one. Well, but as we look the NMU is from an international ranking

Germany's best university so we have to compare up not down. If we're looking at times high education ranking we can look at the universities worldwide. Well, if we look then

Drupal is the leading system but only for the landing pages. If we are looking deeper in the universities often there is Plone for the faculties for the departments and that's where the strengths of Plone is. It's maybe not the marketing platform the users use but it's the

reliable system in the backside that makes all the work with the student to serve the information on doing internet stuff, having write or read protected areas where only someone with

authentication rights could read and so on. So, well, that's a way just to show or think if we choose something that others of our scope choose we can do not something wrong. Well,

it's the same like the industry thing. There's something called the Gartner Magic Quadrant for different systems for web content management systems. Just the boss of the most

of the expensive systems that are used by companies with a lot of money. There we see something like a dope IBM open text or something in it. So, very less open source.

And, well, what's the problem with that? No one ever got fired from buying Cisco IBM. So, if someone just said, I want to be safe, I want to keep my job, I take one of those, doesn't matter if it's the right system or if it's the best system, it just

is the system that everybody takes. And I really think that's the wrong idea. Well, in Germany, there is in the last few months a project called CMS Garden

that were 10 community, 10 or 12 communities of open source content management systems working together, going to exhibitions and present their content management system

side by side. Well, it's interesting, if we calculate the market share of those systems together, it's more than 25% of the whole Internet that is served by those systems. Well, so, if we think on that, we can make one little suggestion that our communities that

are interested in their system and try to promote it. So, we can or should have a look at these communities. But, well, is it how really a company or a university choose their

content management system? No. I've asked a lot of other decision makers why they have chosen their system and, well, it sounds very funny. They said, because we have

someone that already knew the system. It doesn't matter what system, just we have someone who knew the system. Or we bought a new web design and the company just can do it with this system. Stupid, isn't it? It should be the other way around. You should say to the designer what

system he should style, not the designer choose the system for you. From the security point of view, that's social engineering. You just need a designer that's doing well, serving it on your

side and, well, you have the best attack point you can get. Well, on my point of view, the only acceptable reason to choose a system is that it's the best reasonable compromise on requirements. If it's not, give another try. Well, let us take a look at a few systems.

Well, first of all, Plone. In my opinion, Plone is one of the best content management systems

for the audience of a university, of larger governmental institutions, of an NGO or something that has a lot of information and want to secure it and want to have a stable system that works for a long time. Well, Plone is very, very secure. I will have another talk about

the security study for content management systems that was produced by the German Federal Department of Federal Office for IT Security. But, well, Plone is announced as this system

with the lowest amount of vulnerabilities and the best architecture on security point of view.

Well, Plone or the community on Plone has established and encouraged standards. Well, if you look at systems like the ZLDB that is out there for more than 15 years, it's non-SQL, the password of today. We use it since that time.

Tal was once a good thing because if designers working with something like front page or something to do, always their templating system breaks the editor.

Tal does not. Theme proxies, the other, all the time as I've been on meetings with other universities, as I showed the other, they are, oh, wow, that's possible? And that comes out of this community, we have to take a look at it. And, well, Plone encourage the implementation

and fulfillment of standards. Web accessibility initiative is one really important thing because all governmental institutions in Europe and in US and I believe in most of the nations of the world have to be accessibility for everyone.

And most of the systems are not. And I'm really proud that Plone was one of the first content management system that fulfills web content accessibility guidelines too and tried also to

implement the authoring toolkit accessibility guidelines and the application guidelines. And that's the thing that we really should encourage to do it because that's a reason for other systems to be thrown out of the selection. If they are not accessible,

it's knock-out criteria. Well, and another thing is, from my point of view, Plone is just much more than a content management system. Plone is a content integration framework.

It always has been a discussion if Plone is a framework or not. I believe in this case it is and you could, I could not imagine any use case. You could not integrate into Plone.

That's content centric. So Plone has its strengths with it. And there's a reason I want to come back later on because that is why Plone is not only a content management system.

It's a portal system. It's a collaborative system and much, much more. And what one thing that really matters is the community beyond a systems. You have communities that are strong in marketing,

strong in technologies, strong in party, but well, it has to come everything together. And that quote from Arnheim, I'm not sure it was ago that said it to Eric, I don't know what you do, but I want to be part of it. And I think that shows that the Plone community really

is something wonderful and we should strengthen it and work with them. Well, now I want to introduce you to some other systems. Just a very short overlook. So in Germany

the market leader is Typeo 3. Typeo 3 was, from my opinion, once really good competitor to Plone. But they have the same problem as we have had with Zope. They just decided in 2008 that they

will stop the development of the normal branch of Typeo 3 and restart from scratch. They haven't finished it till now, but they stop everything they believe in before, that they never break

backward compatibility, that they're the safest PHP system. Well, the security studies shows it's not. And they are doing a lot of marketing. They are really, really good at marketing.

Well, they have a completely different approach on content management. That's the back end. It's huge back end. You can do a lot with it, but it's so complicated a lot of users are just afraid to look in it. But one thing we can learn from that community is that even very

cheap marketing firms, in this case published long-term support roadmap, shows how or which system with and version is supported how long. And well, it's just one document on the web page

with a visualization and it makes a lot of decision maker happy to see something like that. Why shouldn't we do something like that for Plone? Well, if we're looking on the other side,

on a commercial system, I believe in the European market first spirit is the best commercial system. It has a completely different approach than Plone. It started, it's even older than Plone

and it has a lot of similarities with Plone, but done another way. They use also a non relational database at the ground. They use the Berkeley DB. They're using or they're built on

top of Java and they're doing only static exports. Well, the last few years they have seen that that's the wrong way so they export Java servlet pages so that they have something dynamic

but they have a separate authoring system publishing it to an application server which is integrated and served. Well, the problem is on university level you could not do an incremental export. For a press department, if you have to wait more than 15 minutes that your press release

is online on your web page and the system could not provide it. It's the wrong thing, but the system is very interesting to look into deep. Well, that's point of view how they

define their architecture of their authoring system. So they have different stages and different underlying systems. They could use almost every data storage they want.

It's just like us today with SQLAlchemy. We can just import every relational data in Plone. We have decided to be something we can use from almost all sources the data. They have the possibility to interact with all kinds of application servers so they are not

bound to one technology. First spirits told always in a marketing buzzwords they are just selling the best of breed software. Well, Plone does also, Plone does not everything on their own

but just a point of marketing. So what's interesting on that system is that they have two clients, one through the browser through the web and a separated thick client in Java

and they can do a lot with that. They have something like, oh, the pictures are very bad. They have drag and drop support for images into, they even have something ready like the idea of Deco. What's interesting is they can modify the schema of every object type everywhere in the

content tree. So if they want to add a new field, they do it. It has some flexibilities but, well, for our university it's approximately 2 million euros fee for starting with it

and I do not believe it's the right system because of the static export. Well, they have nice tools. Well, it's a kind of workflow editor so they have a very strong

workflow system also and they're selling things like an app center so for their plugable systems. Another system is easy system, easy publish. It's a very strong system in meteors and they try to go into universities also.

Well, it's an old image of the backend but, well, they have a good idea or I believe one of the best ideas of the PHP systems how to modelize all the content structure of its systems

and they focus on marketing, definitely on marketing. They have even more systems on analysis that in the core than to managing content and they're doing a lot on marketing to

sell the system even if the core is open source. Well, I guess WordPress, everybody knows, but WordPress has very, very simple user interface for starters. Maybe we should look

at those. Where are they better? Even Maggett said that the form editor of them is much easier to use than platform gen. Why not learn from them? And one example is just to choose the header image of the system is very, very simple. We have to provide a similar simple

approach to style a site without going into the deep of theming, even into the deep of the tool. Well, another system is Hanon Hill. Hanon Hill is a content management system that's

very strong in education systems in the US. Well, at the moment, they're switching from the cascade server to a cascade cloud system. So, a cloud-bound system is nothing for European

university with a very, very strong privacy idea. So, that's not allowed. Well, I guess everybody knows Drupal. Drupal, yeah, is maybe a nice system for marketing, but they do not have a stable system over major versions. So, for a large university that has to provide

the web pages for more than 10 years, 20 or, they could not switch over to another system that quick. Drupal is definitely not the right thing. Well, let us take again a look

at the vendor map. Well, Plone is, from the perspective of the vendor map, the only open source tool that is on three lines, on web content and experience management, portal and content integration, and collaboration and social software. And that's a thing we already

knew if we are talking to persons that use Plone in intranet. It's more a portal thing and it's much more than a simple web content management system from the belief of most of them. So,

we have to compare with SharePoint. Oh, that's the map of the horizontal portal. So, like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Liferay, and so on. It's silly that Drupal is in here, but Plone not. That should be changed. Well, SharePoint is one of the competitors,

but we see a lot of setups that Plone is used instead of SharePoint because of its better flexibility. It is a drop-in replacement for most intranets for the use cases they have,

and it's a very good replacement for SharePoint. But we should look at SharePoint. SharePoint has, it's strange, and sometimes it's good even to work together with it. So,

all the Microsoft products were excellent access and so on. Well, SharePoint is there a bit better, and it has a system to do clickable application development. Well, for computer scientists, SharePoint is very strange. They do not understand it.

Plone is just easier to understand, but someone who do not know, okay, systems, can go through it and work with SharePoint. Well, Liferay is not a system.

I should not go too deep. I have some conclusions, recommendations from my point of view. The first thing is the community, the community of Plone is really great, and you should become part of it if you are not. Go sign a contributor agreement and help Plone

make better. I want that we as a community had to make Plone the best content management system for our target audience. And, well, we, therefore, we need to get things done.

Maybe we have to rework the roadmap on a marketing perspective. We have to contribute from code, but code is not the most important thing. Documentation, tests, even marketing ideas,

everything goes in. So, if someone is not a programmer, he also can contribute in a very easy way. And as Liz always said, fuck you, do something. And I believe we should do it, because not always the best system wins the battle. And we should not do it wrong.

If we're doing not marketing, we do it like that. And everything is about communication. We should communicate with other and communicate our ideas of Plone, of content management,

out to the world. And that's the way I like to say to you, go out and spread the word that Plone is one of the best content management systems and should be used. And my opinion is a very easy way, try to help make Plone the default content management system for universities. If a student afterwards is asked which content management system we should use,

they introduce Plone to their companies. And the other side is something like Plone. We should make Plone available for even small sites someone want to use without doing all the

administrative work after it. So, just let's rock and make Plone even better. Thank you.

Sorry. Yeah, just as a side note, the thing that you mentioned about being able to replace the logo of the site, that's a Plone improvement proposal for Plone 5.

It's crazy that it took so long to get it in there, but it looks like it's going to happen. Why Acquia is in the Gartner quadrant? You have to pay, we talked to Gartner about it,

you have to pay about $100,000 to talk to them. And they say it's not to get in there, it's to get their consulting services. But more or less, it means you pay $100,000. So, thank you.