Alan Runayga, Andy McKay and their team at Enfold have just made an annoucment that I believe will cause some tectonic shifts in the open-source CMS landscape: they’ve released Plone Desktop 2.0 under a free-for-noncommercial-use license. Here’s part of their announcement:
After much consideration Enfold Systems acknowledges the need for Plone to dominate a particular industry. So to encourage adoption by the non-commercial market (NGOs, Government Agencies and Educational Institutions), our licensing has changed dramatically. Plone Desktop is officially now available for free to non-commercial use.
So, what is Plone Desktop? Basically, it’s a piece of client-side software (Windows only, sorry), that allows users to perform a bunch of website publishing tasks straight from the Windows Explorer. This is huge for intranets, extranets and other collaboration-focused sites.
They’ve got a Flash Demo that will take your breath away.
Even more encouraging are Enfold’s reasons for releasing Plone Desktop 2.0 to nonprofits:
*Enfold Systems wishes to offer a compelling reason for all non-commercial organizations to seriously look at the Plone platform for daily use as an Intranet and/or Content Management System with Desktop Integration.
*The community is full of bright and creative talent. We are hoping to learn how Plone Desktop is ultimately implemented to meet their needs. We will make every effort possible to accommodate motivated individuals in the community to expose hooks and APIs to make Plone Desktop succeed for the entire community.
*Ensure proper DAV compliance amongst Zope and Plone software components. Promote a healthy DAV strategy for all of the Zope/Plone product developers. Ensure that DAV is available and supported in their products.
That’s throwing down the gauntlet. But, given our amazing experiences with putting Plone in the hands of nontechnical nonprofits over the past year, I think their confidence in Plone is well warranted.
I can’t wait to see what kinds of tricks this will let us do.
jon, will you be doing a more thorough review somewhere, something we can share with the other npo plone users?
Absolutely. Need to get over some installation hurdles first. (My first go at installing the “lightweight” server-side component wasn’t very smooth, but that is probably more my limited Zope admin knowledge than a flaw of the product.)
Jon, do you know if they are planning to develop a Macintosh version?
I’m not sure, but I suspect not. The product leverages a lot of the Windows Explorer functions, so I’m guessing that a Mac port wouldn’t be trivial (even though the code is in Python). But I suppose in theory it would be possible to build a stand-alone app like that offered similar functions on the Mac side. However, Enfold is funding development by selling PD into the corporate space, and Mac just doesn’t have much market share there. Yet.
Andrew Burkhalter here (huge Mac-fan) just spent some quality time with Enfold’s Andy McKay, and he may well know more. I’ll check back and report.
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