Hi. I just wrote up some very high level roadmap for Plone "The product" for some EU proposal. I thought it fits a marketing text more closely than an actual roadmap.
Maybe some of you can use this or are interested in this. Some parts might be specific to please EU bureaucrats ;) Hanno
Next steps for Plone development Being primarily based on contributions from individuals and small to medium companies the advancement of Plone is bound to contributions which do not exceed a certain time commitment. In order to be successful as a product in the mid to long term, various more infrastructure level advancements need to happen, which exceed the maximum capacity for each contributing party. Document life-cycle management In order for Plone to be used as a true document system various areas of the software need to be improved. Office and Desktop integration via WebDAV, and support for the OpenDocument format would allow better integration with typical administrative work environments. For Plone to be used as a real document archive a compelling versioning and staging solution is needed. Furthermore an archiving solution that complies to legal obligations for document and general information archiving is a key factor for Plone to be used in certain industries. In the same way better reporting, auditing and content license management support become more important in the ongoing information age. Rich media handling Todays information is no longer restricted to text based data but rich media plays an important role and has been made available to organizations and individuals. Plone currently does not take advantage of information embedded in audio, image or video content and doesn't scale to support even medium-sized media libraries. While geographic location is becoming a more prominent factor, Plone only has minimal support for handling geographic information. Integration Monolithic software solutions don't meet todays requirements anymore. Plone needs to play well with other systems and offer a compelling integration story. Today this means a better Web Services API and support for data portability to avoid vendor or solution lock-in. Support for inbound and outbound content syndication via open standards like RSS, CalDAV, RDF and general microformats as well as authentication and user support via OpenID, OAuth and Open Social standards will become even more important in the near future. Business processes Plone already supports tools and options to customize the software to individual business needs and processes. Currently many of those customizations still need a high expertise and knowledge. Better visual tools to empower users to gain control over their software solutions would help to enable organizations and companies to adapt Plone to their individuals needs without external help. This includes control over the structure of the managed data, management of the content publishing workflow and ways to supplement the system in a constrained way with simple business logic. Availability Today information access is much more personalized and available from many more places and devices. Plone lacks good mobile device and mobile access support. A focus on mobile availability sets constrains to the application in terms of processing power and available bandwidth of the application. While the industry nations have a high coverage of broadband connectivity, enabling the use of Plone in constrained resource environments helps to allow Plone to be adopted in developing countries. Internationalization Plone already offers compelling multi-lingual support and translations into many common languages. It is currently built around ISO-639-1, which only supports wildly used languages. In order to offer full support for minority and local languages the system needs to be updated to support RFC4646. Related to this the support for non-latin based scripts and scripts written from right to left needs to be improved. Technical Infrastructure Plone is built on a software stack with Python and Zope as the two major foundations. On both levels further technological advancements are forthcoming which Plone needs to adopt to and which will allow increased reuse of software components in a larger software community. Plone also needs some deep technological changes to be used in low-cost hosting and cloud computing environments to allow a more cost effective access to Plone.
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