Plone and JBoss, among others

Yesterday I learned that my corporation is considering changing their intranet portal to JBoss. (It is currently an Oracle-based system, previously Vignette.) The internal discussion website had almost no comments, which is odd. A couple people down in human-computer interactions are doing a portal usability study and that would make an excellent starting point in evaluating any future portal.

Anyway, I took advantage of the opportunity to research Plone and JBoss. What I found was excellent. If you've not watched the NASA/JPL presentation on Plone, JBoss, Django, TurboGears, et al., you owe it to yourself to spend 40 minutes with this screencast. It provides entertaining, realistic, useful measures of effectiveness of systems. Thanks to Floyd May for posting that link on Plone.org.

Plone and Tibet

What with all the unrest in Tibet, I was trolling around the Web looking for information and trying to get a grip on the Chinese Web filtering problem. As an aside I thought I'd search for "plone tibet" and see what came up. Here are a few of the interesting sites that popped up.

• The biodiversity site for the Hengduan Mountains. This is hosted by a team at Harvard at their world famous Arnold Arboretum. As a former botanist, I can appreciate a site like this.
  
• The China--North Rhine-Westphalia university collaboration portal is a Plone site. I'm not particularly surprised by or pleased with their one-sided reporting of the rioting and the Chinese response.
  
• The UN Joint Logistics Center (UNJLC) has a Plone portal with a small news item under their "Early warnings and Preparedness" section. Their links to the GDACS (Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System) shows how dynamic this world is.
  
• The Sino-Burma News is running Plone and has a detailed news item from five days ago.
  
• Finally, there's a recent news item at both the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy website (see page 7 in the pdf) and the Central Tibetan Administration (TibetNet) about Plone and other FOSS training provided to Tibetan expats in Dharamshala at the end of January. Good job, Mahiti, a Bangalore-based non-governmental organization that provided the training. Mahiti is a frequent sponsor of Plone conferences.
  

Plone Symposium East

The Plone Symposium East is happening this week. I was hoping the keynote plenary address would be webcast, but I'll have to wait until the post-production slides or video are posted.

I'm going back and revisiting my spreadsheet on Bullock's measures of effectiveness.

• Four security vulnerabilities are still listed with the Mitre CVE website although all have been patched and then resolved with subsequent releases.
  
• High quality sites that use Plone have increased 24% to 1080 since last October (155 days).
• Meanwhile, the rate of release continues with a healthy string of small fixes rolling out since 3.0 came on the scene. The frequency of major release has stretched 12 days and is now at 357 days with an R-squared of 90%.