[Evangelism] RE: Plone marketing- WPD2008 Slide Deck

[Dylan Jay]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nate Aune [mailto:natea at jazkarta.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, 21 October 2008 3:26 PM
> To: Matt Hamilton
> Cc: Alexander Limi; gerry_kirk at alumni.uwaterloo.ca; Constance Kobylarz;
> virginia at pretaweb.com; Dylan Jay; gabrielle at sixfeetup.com; Chris Johnson;
> Mark A Corum; xavier at zeapartners.org; Roberto Allende; Luciano Ramalho;
> Horak, Karl; Jordan Baker; duffyd at kokorice.org; evangelism at lists.plone.org
> Subject: Re: Plone marketing- WPD2008 Slide Deck
> 
> >> Maybe "integration" is better than "customization"?
> >
> > I think integration is a bit more of a loaded word.  I can imagine many
> > potential customers saying 'but I don't need any integration!'.  I
> really
> > like the graph, but yes I think we need a way to better show proportions
> and
> > what you are getting.  I think most of us here would agree that with OSS
> the
> > total cost would be lower, so I'm wondering if we might want to not have
> 50K
> > for both.  The problem then is what *do* we say for both... as we are
> just
> > showing example indicative costs of some theoretical project....
> 
> Yeah, both "integration" and "customization" are loaded words. The
> bottom line is that if you only have $100k to spend on a CMS, a
> commercial CMS will consume $30-50k in license fees, which means less
> money available to do more interesting things like training, support
> and enhancements.
> 
> I know one large non-profit that chose a commercial intranet solution
> over Plone because the commercial vendor included everything in the
> pricing, and the product appeared to do more "out-of-the-box" whereas
> Plone appeared to require a lot of customization to get it to do what
> the commercial product was offering. We need better marketing
> materials to show what Plone is capable of providing out-of-the-box,
> and how it can be easily extended with 3rd party add-on components.
> Otherwise, we're going to continue to get reamed by these vendors
> hawking proprietary CMSes.

100% agree. And one thing you hear about sharepoint is its strong "out of
the box" integration story. E.g. with MS word etc (We're having problems now
as we can't say Plone integrates with TRIM out of the box and sharepoint
can). So that's an extra reason not to use the word integration in this
context.

Of course we all know systems like sharepoint and SAP need crap loads of
customization in reality but they don't sell it that way.

How about the word tailoring?