Last week, Netsight were at the Online Information 2011 expo in London. This is a big expo focussed at online information providers and management. There are a lot of information professionals and librarians there, and a lot of vendors selling both sources of information and tools to manage the information (Content Management, Search, etc.)
The show this year moved to a more compact venue, the National Hall at Olympia, which is slightly smaller than the previous Grand Hall location they used. This has actually been a good thing, as there are slightly fewer stands, and a higher density of people wandering about. Again this year there is a parallel running conference and many people from the conference are coming down to the expo to have a look around the stands.
Netsight have been maning a Plone stand again this year. We have been handing out Plone brochures, and chatting to people about Plone and putting them in touch with local Plone companies if they are from abroad. About 20-30% of the people we talk to on the stand are not from the UK.
We had some great neighbours at the show with a creative design agency from Manchester, Mickey & Mallory next door to us. Sarah, their MD, did a fantastic talk alongside Ed Fay from the London School of Economics about their new digital library project based on the Open Source repository software Fedora Commons which in a nice piece of serendipity uses Plone for their website.
We have also been giving demos of Plone itself and showing people some of the add-ons for Plone such as Linguaplone which always impresses people. I still get a kick out of setting the language to Arabic in Firefox and watching Plone translate its interface and switch to right-to-left mode.
We must have given out around 150 Plone brochures to people and collected the contact details of those wanting more information or wanting further demos later on.
Unlike previous years, I don't think I had a single person ask 'So what is Open Source then?'. I guess this year finally most people know about Open Source and the majority of it understand the main aspects of it. One of the most common questions now is 'So it's kinda like Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal?'. Our general answer to questions like that focus on the aspects of Plone which really make it stand out from the competitors which are the workflow, user management, and local roles. Yes if you want a simple site then Wordpress might be the tool for the job for you, but if you have a large number of content creators and you need to manage their rights and roles throughout a site and perhaps workflow their contributions then Plone wins hands down.
It was also a chance to chat to others in the general content management industry and good to catch up briefly with Real Story Group analyst Theresa Regli who was giving a keynote talk on "Search and content management trends for 2012 and beyond". One of the interesting tidbits from her talk was that in the world of Enterprise Search more and more customers are asking 'Why NOT Open Source [search]?' rather than 'WHY Open Source [search]?', which is showing how far Open Source in general has come in terms of being accepted in the enterprise.
I also got a chance to chat to Brian Teeman, co-founder of Joomla!, who stopped by the stand for a chat. Most of the chat was focussed on business models of Open Source. There are a number of Open Source vendors at Online Information (Hippo, Squiz, a few Drupal companies) whom are Open Source by license, but whose business model generally revolves around one single large dominant vendor of their software. With both Plone and Joomla! the community is pretty level with no 800 pound Gorilla of a company in the community.... and we'd like to both keep it that way. I'm glad when pitching Plone to prospective clients that I don't have to worry about competing against the professional services division of the software I'm trying to pitch.
Again this year, I was also speaking in one of the show-floor theatres. This year however the theatres were open sided, which meant more people could just stop by when wanding past and listen for a few moments about whatever we being spoken about. My talk was fairly well attended with only a couple of empty seats. Originally my talk was due to be done in conjunction with a client of ours, but alas she was unable to attend, so I did the full talk myself.
A slidecast of my talk is available on Slideshare now and embedded below:
So, all in all a pretty successful show. Next year Online Information will move out to the docklands to the ExCeL centre and will change its format to merge both the conference and the expo into one combined ticket price.