[Evangelism] cost comparison

Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.] ken.wasetis at contextualcorp.com
Wed Dec 9 18:23:25 UTC 2009


Norman,

What type of shop do you run or work at, and where are you located?

It'd be great to get more user/adopter/designer/developer user stories 
out there by way of interview/ustream/youtube.  There's been a lot of 
FUD put out there by the PHP-ers of the world about how difficult Plone 
was to get ramped up with.  They leave out that PHP is the only 
scripting technology that they know and that Plone doesn't use PHP, of 
course.

Anyhow, if you can do a self-produced video/screencast of the things 
you've found that Plone makes easy that you haven't found in other 
tools, it would be so powerful in getting the word out.  This type of 
message from Plone integrators just doesn't carry as much weight.

Thanks,
Ken Wasetis
www.contextualcorp.com

Norman Fournier wrote:
> On 2009-12-08, at 11:33 PM, Alexander Limi wrote:
>
>> Also, TCO usually means "we couldn't find any other way to justify 
>> the cost of our product, and we're taking a beating in the market 
>> right now, so we made up* this totally arbitrary calculation that 
>> shows our competitor as being harder to use / weird to set up / too 
>> communist."
>>
>> * aka. "paid a company to make charts"
>>
>> At least that's what usually happens when Microsoft starts touting 
>> TCO numbers. ;)
>>
>> -- 
>> Alexander Limi · http://limi.net <http://limi.net/>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 8:27 PM, Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.] 
>> <ken.wasetis at contextualcorp.com 
>> <mailto:ken.wasetis at contextualcorp.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     Virginia,
>>
>>     I had mentioned this Sharepoint cost calculator link when adding
>>     to Francesco's blog post comparing Plone and Sharepoint too.
>>      Besides the cost factor, it couldn't hurt you to re-read his
>>     (two-part?) blog post regarding the Plone vs. Sharepoint
>>     comparison.
>>      http://francescociriaci.wordpress.com/2008/12/22/plone-vs-moss-round-1/
>>
>>     I had helped a for-profit university evaluate commercial CMS
>>     tools a few years ago and they chose RedDot.  At the time, the
>>     price for their .Net-based CMS plus their Java-based personalized
>>     portal delivery engine, plus a 'Quick Start' where a small
>>     portion of the website was themed/implemented was to run about
>>     $330K in US$.
>>
>>     Teamsite was in that evaluation as well, and their offering is
>>     broken up into many modules, so it's harder to compare, but this
>>     client would have paid a bit more for what they needed from IWOV
>>     than what the RedDot (now OpenText) price was, even.  Probably
>>     not a lot more, though.
>>
>>     Seems like the bigger players such as
>>     Autonomy/Interwoven/Teamsite, OpenText/Vignette, etc. are in the
>>     350-500K US$ range by the time you buy licenses for not only your
>>     production servers, but also development and/or staging.
>>
>>     Not to mention that the per-hour integrator rates I was seeing
>>     were in the $175+/hr range US$, which is 30-40% more than most
>>     Plone shops will charge.
>>
>>     Plus, you should build a comparison that looks at year 2, 3, etc.
>>      With the commercial tools, the client will be paying 20%/year of
>>     license cost just to keep up with patches/upgrades, no on-site
>>     services, just emergency support, access to the online knowledge
>>     base, forums, etc.
>>     If you do a 3-year Total Cost of Ownership comparison, I can't
>>     imagine the other tools, even Sharepoint, coming close to Plone
>>     on a financial basis, but others would disagree.
>>
>>     -Ken
>>
>>
>>     Nate Aune wrote:
>>
>>         i don't know about Reddot or Teamsite, but the Sharepoint
>>         calculator can be used to determine the total cost of
>>         ownership if you have to buy all the user licenses and
>>         software licenses for the other dependent Microsoft products.
>>         http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/sharepoint-price-calculator/default.aspx
>>
>>         found via Cynapse blog:
>>         http://www.cynapse.com/blog/cynin-low-cost-alternative-sharepoint
>>
>>         Nate
>>
>>         On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 9:05 PM, Virginia Choy
>>         <virginia at pretaweb.com <mailto:virginia at pretaweb.com>
>>         <mailto:virginia at pretaweb.com
>>         <mailto:virginia at pretaweb.com>>> wrote:
>>
>>            Hi,
>>
>>            
>>            Does anyone have any documentation about total cost of
>>         ownership
>>            or general cost comparisons between deploying Plone,
>>         Sharepoint,
>>            Teamsite,, RedDot or any other proprietary enterprise
>>         solution?
>>
>>            
>>            Thanks Virginia
>>            
>>            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>>            Virginia Choy
>>            Business Development Manager
>>            PretaWeb - Plone Open Source Enterprise Web Solutions
>>            Suite 2, Level 6, 99 York Street, Sydney 2000 NSW Australia
>>            P: 612-8081-9072
>>            M: 0423-198-306
>>            W: www.pretaweb.com <http://www.pretaweb.com/>
>>         <http://www.pretaweb.com <http://www.pretaweb.com/>>
>>
>>            Sales & Support: 02-9955-2830
>>             _______________________________________________
>>            Evangelism mailing list
>>            Evangelism at lists.plone.org
>>         <mailto:Evangelism at lists.plone.org>
>>         <mailto:Evangelism at lists.plone.org
>>         <mailto:Evangelism at lists.plone.org>>
>>
>>            http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
>>
>
>
> Plone has been shown to be the least expensive web dev environment of 
> all, save raw xhtml and css, at least for me, if only based on getting 
> the job done. All promises look inexpensive until the rubber hits the 
> road. Based on comparisons between custom apps developed jsp and 
> plone, plone is bar none the hands down winner as far as speed to the 
> gate and working features. No comparison.
>
> I have fired all web-dev and do it using plone. It is hard to impress 
> how significant this capacity is, for a designer, being able to even 
> program a form without contracting a programmer. What a significant 
> hurdle that simple function presents.
>
> Plone has shown it gets the job done, vanilla. Many discussions on the 
> plone-user list regarding deployment issues turn out moot or 
> redundant. Plone is great software. For comparison, Codeigniter offer 
> a Zope-like interface into lamphp but lacks a graphical ttw plone-like 
> interface, which I intuitively know to be significant but am unable to 
> articulate the manifold advantages this gives plone. But I know if 
> offers another context in which to interface with and manipulate the 
> Zope Object DataBase, a development context that Codigniter appears to 
> lack. I focus on Codeigniter as LAMP seems to be taking over the web.
>
> Norman




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