Last week, our friends at Enfold Systems released Plone Desktop 2.0 Beta with a free-for-non-commericial use license. (I blogged it with with great excitement.)

We’ve tested Plone Desktop 2.0 a bit since then. Good news and bad to report.

UPDATE: The conflict with PloneArticle I describe below has been fixed by an updated version of the DavPack product. Thanks to Enfold for providing such a quick fix. Now if I only can resolve some client-side permissions errors, I think we’ll be in business!

The good news is that we’ve tested Plone Desktop in our desktop “sandbox” sites. Plone Desktop is really powerful, and really easy to use. I think this will revolutionize how people build and use “intranet/extranet” type websites that are focused around document sharing. It will also make bulk importing of content into a website way faster and easier.

I also think that Plone Desktop plus the forthcoming OpenOffice 2.0, which appears to write pretty darn good HTML code from word processor documents, will make a killer low-end “everyday web publishing” environment for non-technical users.

The bad news: Plone Desktop appears to have a conflict with PloneArticle, an important plug-in for Plone that allows users to create richly templated documents with images, attachments and links.

I’m not enough of a Plone expert to say exactly what’s causing the conflict, but I’ve reported the bug with pretty detailed info, and we’ll see if a solution is forthcoming. It is beta software, after all.

But, the immediate impact of this is that it means we can’t test Plone Desktop with any of our production sites, because they pretty much all either use PloneArticle or on a server with another site that does. That’s a bummer.