acsr industrialdesign is Partner of the Plone Intranet Consortium Initiative

During the annual international Plone Conference in Bristol, the Plone Intranet Consortium has lifted an early preview into what is coming up in the first half of 2015. What is the story behind?

Joined Forces

Over six major Plone Consulting companies around the world had decided in the last year to join forces and consolidate their individual software stacks on top of Plone into one shared codebase. The group is growing and acsr is now part of the team, supporting marketing and communcations.

The Vison

Driven by Guido Stevens, the head behind the Joint Venture, the "United we stand" message fired up the Open Source community approach to take the already successfull efforts to a much bigger new horizon.

The companies are experienced developers and integrators that are delivering lots of bigger Intranets for big players every year. Intranets are no "Stock" products. The most significant value comes from customizations that fit exactly the needs of the customers.

Plone Intranet Suite

The new collection of packages (comparable to App Modules in other product scenarios) is called Plone Intranet Suite and will be available as 100% Open Source Code. It will deliver a much better out of the box base functionality for next generation social communication features. So having the same budgets, customers can boost their results and focus more on the individual challenges of their scenarios.

Growing investments

Usually an Intranet solution invokes investments of 50k+ Euros for development and integration. So building on top of secure and proven Open Source Software can save money and bring better results at the same time. The flexibility the customizing of Plone can provide is based on rocksolid Python code wrapped in a component architecture that is foundation of the permanent evolving refactoring of the source code behind Plone.

Plone is alive and an excellent solution

Plone is constantly under development since more than 20 years. The project is alive and still attracts constant contribution of coders from the whole world. The number of commits and committers to the core and the addon univierse is constantly growing in the last years. Intranets and websites running Plone are usually choosen by responsively thinking organisations and companies that have a look at security risks and overall costs over time. If you can proper calculate every segment of these investments you will get an overall performance and ROI exceeding most other commercial or free systems.

Commercial Offspring Quaive

Update: Today the commercial version Quaive has much more momentum than the original Plone Intranet concept. It turned out that the active development needed to be consolidated and the original consortium was diluted because of strategic reorientation of members in the upcoming new opportunities for Big Data and AI in the Python sector. You find an article how acsr and evenios created the brand experience for Quaive here.