Plomino talk at European Plone Consortium 2009

Plomino: build your business-specific applications without programming

Continuous improvement and innovation in Plone core and in its add-on products make now possible to cover nearly all the functional components in the corporate information system. But build business-specific application, even simple, using Plone often involves important development timescales implemented by Plone experts only. With its approach similar to Lotus Domino or to Microsoft Access, Plomino brings simplicity and flexibility to build, deploy and maintain business-specific applications entirely from the Plone web interface without programming.

This session is about Plomino. The objective is to explain what Plomino can do, who can use it, and what for.

• I will first present a quick overview of the possible approaches when you want to create a business-specific application in Plone.
• I will then introduce the main Plomino features.
• I will explain why Plomino is an ideal toolkit for non-developer Plone users, and why Plone developers may also find it useful.

Then I will talk about Plomino extensions possibilities, about its performances,  I will present different Plomino use cases, and explain when Plomino is a good strategy and when other approaches, like plone.dexterity, may be more accurate.

Duration: 40 minutes.

How to migrate from Lotus Domino to Plone

Lotus Domino is a well-known collaborative platform and has been widely used in a lot of companies for a very long time.

It offers a huge set of highly integrated features plus a powerful ability to build business-specific applications easily. That makes Lotus Domino a very useful tool to support all the business information processes, but it also makes it a very specific environment.

When companies consider migrating from Lotus Domino to another platform (opensource or not), they evaluate mainly two possibilities: use a more standard collaborative platform and give up all their specific applications (thus reducing the benefits offered by their system), or build custom collaborative applications using a technical framework (where implementing any new specific need is more expensive than using Lotus Domino).

However, Plone is definitely a very interesting and credible alternative.

In this session, I will expose:

• how Plone and its products can fulfill typical Domino users' needs,
• how specific Domino applications can be migrated to Plone using Plomino,
• how Domino documents can be imported into Plone,
• how to manage a partial migration from Lotus Domino to Plone (and how to use Domino LDAP server to authentify users in Plone)

Duration: 40 minutes