New Portals

Well since I posted that graph of portal development since 2004, I've been pleasantly surprised to have some more Plone work drop out of the trees. I've set up a Foreign Currency Exchange Portal to let our outward-bound international travelers more easily link up with people who have unspent foreign currency from previous trips. Our Chemical Security folks need a new portal and the sensor group is meeting with us next week to discuss either an extension to the existing one or a separate one altogether for medium-range planning. Proposals are going in for a MENA (Middle East/North Africa) online community-building network and a follow-on to the WACSI workshop, this time in Aleppo. Other international agencies are looking favorably towards our capabilities.

Its difficult to put numbers on these kind of success stories beyond simply counting portals against time as I did before. But there are significant differences in workflow customizations, security tweaks, volume of content, user/owner training, and archetype development for each of these. The bottom line is that our Corporate tool, SharePoint, does not provide the additional products, the ease of customization, or webpage publishing capacities of Plone. We continue to see as much work as our team can handle. Before too long, we'll be hiring new staff to handle the increasing loads.

This sort of anecdotal evidence of CMS success may not have the rigor that I hoped for when I started this blog, but it certainly doesn't have me laying awake at night worrying about what projects we'll use to cover our time-charges next week.