[Evangelism] Business oriented whitepapers/demos (was: Sharepoint vs. Plone)

[Ross Patterson]

I had the pleasure of meeting with Carles Guell from Barcelona while he
was in San Francisco recently.  First things first, I'd like to invite
him to the Plone evangelism list and to invite the marketing team to
make good use of him.  :)

He expressed interest in improving the marketing story or Plone.
Specifically he found the he often lacked the kind of marketing or
business oriented whitepapers and demos he needs to compete with other
CMS's.  He also had some good ideas about improving Plone's presence in
the media.  He also mentioned his company could put some time into
improving these stories.

Being more of a developer than a marketer, I'm not necessarily the best
to comment but I do know I'd love to see his interest help Plone out.
Welcome Carles!

Ross

Nate Aune <natea at jazkarta.com> writes:

> Idea to create whitepaper from Plone and Sharepoint stories. See
> http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-marketing/plone-vs-sharepoint
>
>> A great idea Nate!  Just to point out to those that mgiht not have seen it
>> yet, my blog post from Internet World:
>>
>> http://www.netsight.co.uk/blog/2009/5/1/plone-at-internet-world-expo
>
> Yes, great post!
>
>> I had a couple of people come by the stand and look at the brochure, and
>> when I approched them they said 'oh we use microsfot technology...' or 'oh
>> we are going to use sharepoint'.  I think the key is to really show users
>> that Plone vs Sharepoint is like Apples vs Oranges.  They really are
>> different beasts.  I normally start by telling people that they can co-exist
>> together and really serve slightly different functions.   The people I
>> showed demos to of Plone at the expo really were blown away by the
>> flexibility of Plone and what can be achieve with it.
>
> Yes, it's not fair to compare the two systems because they are
> fundamentally targeting different use cases, but one cannot deny that
> Plone's feature set overlaps a lot with what Sharepoint provides, and
> vice versa.
>
>> I think they biggest thing to get over, is as Karl says in his Blog post,
>> that in corporate-land deploying Sharepoint comes under a central IT budget.
>>  Even if the costs are higher (which is another topic... people think it is
>> 'free') the end department that wants it is rarely the one that pays for it.
>
> Good point. I came across this SaaS cost savings calculator which
> might be useful for getting a good overview of what traditional
> "on-premise" software from the likes of Microsoft, Lotus, etc. costs
> an organization depending on how many users they have.
> http://www.phase2.com/savings/
>
> Nate
>
> p.s. cc'ing the evangelism list since others might want to join in on
> this conversation.