On 15 Dec 2008, at 19:30, Hanno Schlichting wrote:
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
I would like to thank Hanno for the quality of the work done, his
input was very helpfull. The goal of this proposal is to fund
activities that address issues that would benefit the whole Plone/
Zope ecosystem. It includes technical work as well as resources for
worldwide promotion. I will come back with more information in the
coming months.
Xavier
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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