Its the start of day 2 at Online Information 2010 (formerly IMS) at Earls Court Olympia's Grand Hall in London, and we are here manning the Plone stand.
This year's show has been a bit smaller than the previous years, and when we came in to build the stand the night before you could tell the show started quite a bit further back from the loading bay compared to previous years. Once inside you don't notice as much as the show organisers are very clever int he way the arrange the partitions such that you don't see any of the unused space of the hall.
That said, whilst it has been quite a bit quieter in terms of foot-fall, everyone we have spoken to has seemed a lot more interesting and genuinely in a position to be evaluating a CMS. Maybe the snow and tube strike the past few days has kept away those people who would have just gone to the show in order to get a day out of the office, as opposed to those people who are truly doing research.
What is very noticeable is the reduction in commercial CMS vendors here this year. There are far fewer than before and their stands are a lot smaller than they have been in previous years. This year from the commercial CMS sector there is just Terminal 4, OpenText, and Jadu. No sign of Alterian, Fatwire, Sitecore or many of the others. There is however considerably more 'Open Source' vendors here. Plone is still the only Community Open Source product, but on the commercial Open Source front, there is Squiz, Hippo and eZ Systems. So I would actually say that there is more Open Source here than there is commercial in the CMS world.
It is actually quite interesting to see that the Plone stand is actually bigger than the OpenText stand this year. Jadu have also scaled back quite considerably and instead of the enormous black, 2001-like, megalith in the middle of the show floor glittering with LCD screens and live demos, surrounded by about 30 staff, it is now a more modest small booth, with one table and a single computer, a sofa and about 4 staff.
Whether this is a sign that the commercial CMS market as a whole are having to tighten their belts a bit and pare down their fees, or if it is just par for the global economy, I'm not sure.
As I said though, we had no shortage of people coming to chat to us at the Plone stand.We must have given away around 150 Plone Brochures on the day, and gave demos to around 30 people. So whilst the overall footfall seems to be lower, the number of people we have actually talked to has probably been the same as previous years.
The talks in the seminar theaters started off with Teresa Regli from Real Story Group (formerly CMS Watch) doing a keynote on An overview of the UK and European Web Content Management marketplace. She broke the market place down based upon a number of dividing lines that she sees in the CMS marketplace. One point she stressed quite a bit was the location of companies -- UK clients generally want to deal with UK or US companies more so than European companies. And to be very aware of where companies actually have their development/implementation teams. ie. you might find a company has a sales office in the UK, but actually all their developers are in another country. So when it comes down to the implementation, do you really want the people doing the work to be 8 timezones away? I think this is a point that plays very well in Plone's favour. At the Plone Conference last month, there were attendees from 33 different countries, and as we are always keen to point out to international visitors to the Plone stand, there is normally a company local to them.
Side rant: how can a show called Online Information 2010 NOT have a network connection available for speakers? The email from the organisers said 'if you want to demo something use the print screen button' -- just how out of touch are these organizers with their show?! Especially for a talk specifically on demoing SaaS and webapps?
I followed Teresa, with a talk on Doing more with less - Open Source software, SaaS and WebApp. Rather than just stand up and show people slides and talk theoretical I took the bold step of doing a live coding demo. This was a gamble, as I really didn't want to scare people off by showing them code, yet what I wanted to get across to them was how quickly Plone can be integrated with other systems out there. In a half hour talk, I produced a demo from scratch (OK, some code was pre-written to copy and paste into the files) of integrating Plone with Huddle and Google Docs using their respective APIs. The use-case I used was that you are in a large company and want to get feedback from a large number of outside people. There is no way your IT department is going to allow you to create accounts for these people on your intranet (worst case scenario, you would have to create them in your AD server, which would NEVER be allowed). So I setup a Google Docs spreadsheet, a form from that which a link to could then be emailed around to everyone you wanted to participate. They could fill this form in with their feedback, and then using the gdata API bring that data into Plone to be displayed as a view. Taking it further I integrated with Huddle such that you could then click on a link next to the entry in Plone and it would send it to a discussion space in Huddle and start a new discussion on this feedback.
Whilst the organisers wouldn't provide network access for the speakers, luckily the Plone stand was close enough to the seminar theater that I could pick up the wifi from the stand.
The talk went surprisingly well, and I managed to not make a single mistake on the coding, despite having to create a new package, views, ZCML, run buildout etc in front of a live audience. The only problem was I forgot to start the screencast recording for it, as I had some projector troubles before the start of the talk and I had to reboot and re-set everything up just before the talk started. I do however have the practice screencasts I did, which I kept as backup in case I had no network connection at the talk. So I will probably put them up online when I get back to the office, or try and re-record the talk I did as it really does showcase the power of Plone.
So on to day 2 now... will report back later.