[Evangelism] Marketing Questions
Spanky
spanky at 3x6x9.com
Tue Mar 18 19:14:49 UTC 2008
Begin forwarded message:
From: Spanky <spanky at 3x6x9.com>
Date: March 17, 2008 2:13:58 PM PDT
To: plone-strategic-planning-discussion at lists.openplans.org
Subject: [2008 PSPS] Marketing Questions
Reply-To: plone-strategic-planning-discussion at lists.openplans.org
Greetings:
Here are some real-world questions I'm receiving from our sales staff
regarding Plone. These seem like great 'in the wild' questions that
we could develop formal responses for and post on one page on
Plone.org to point sales people at. I would LOVE to see the
community utilize the techniques Mark talked about, to develop well-
thought-out, stock answers that resellers like ourselves can utilize
in a sales situation.
I realize this is NOT the right list, but where should I send this to?
Here are the questions and the answers I gave as a starting point:
Q: Describe how PLONE can accommodate future changes in technology
and technical regulations
A: Requires longer answer, forthcoming
Q: Specifically, what is the roadmap for the web content management
product?
A: Requires longer answer
Q: Indicate frequency of new releases
A: http://plone.org/products/plone/releases
I am trying to get dates for these releases, but this gives you an
idea of how many and why
Q: How is maintenance release information conveyed
A: Maintenance releases are announced via the website, mailing list,
and in the active IRC channel. Comprehensive changelogs and history
are kept of all code changes, and released with each distribution.
All changes to the code repository are publicly available and
instantly published via automated mailing list/newsgroup at
comp.web.zope.plone.cvs
There is a release manager as well as release team responsible for
managing the release schedule and stewarding the release process,
including testing.
There is also a framework team which works with the community to
develop the roadmap of the future direction of the core software.
Q: Frequency of patches, fixes
A: Patches and hotfixes tend to be released for security purposes,
rather than for features or bugfixes. They are released immediately
upon recognition and resolution of any security issues. Plone has
enjoyed very few security patches or hotfixes over the past 5 years.
If I remember correctly, there have been 3-4 major security patches.
I can get solid numbers on this if youd like.
Q: From your knowledge how does the Plone community address...
Q: Process for product defect reporting
A: Defects for Plone can be submitted to the issue tracker on
Plone.org. 3rd party products that are found in the Products area of
Plone.org have the option of adding an issue tracker, and most do.
However, this is not enforced and some products may not have issue
trackers on Plone.org. 3rd party products may also use their own
hosting solutions for their issues. For example, if CIGNEX had a
product, it could be listed in the Products section but link directly
to a CIGNEX hosted/controlled page and issue tracker such as
Bugzilla, if we so desired.
Q: Knowledge bases, online FAQs, reported problems
A: The Plone community has made a concerted effort in the past 3
years to write more documentation and maintain the new and existing
documentation. There is a very active Documentation Team which
identifies areas that are lacking through community feedback and
research, and champions the documentation process by working directly
with developers and establishing "Best Practices" for documentation
writers. The most comprehensive documentation can be found on
Plone.org, although other developer-driven sites also have a wealth
of information, such as:
"Planet Plone" is a Plone-sponsored website (http://
planet.plone.org/ )for users and developers to write about their
experiences with Plone, which can be considered a knowledge base.
Plope: http://plope.com
http://plone.net is dedicated to solution providers, example sites,
success stories, and use cases And many more blogs, RSS feeds, etc.
Q: User groups, annual conferences, active user communities
A: The diverse community surrounding Plone is one of it's main
selling points and features. The worldwide community is very active,
and extremely proactive, agile, dedicated, and intelligent. There is
one official annual conference in the fall, which also acts as the
host for the annual meeting of the Plone Foundation where the Board
of Directors is elected. There are a few large symposiums throughout
the year (there is one happening right now at Penn State). There are
Zope/Plone user groups in most major cities in the US and several in
Europe, Austrailia/New Zealand, and Japan, to name a few. There are
a variety of mailing lists for users, developers, marketing, user
interface, as well as very vibrant online chat channels. The core
community members are very helpful and responsive to new users and
heavweights alike.
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