Tom Parish is a Web renaissance man. Not only does he bring interesting and informative people to his Talking Portraits podcast site, he also is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultant. Parish is an evangelist for the Plone Content Management System (CMS). We asked him what benefits his favored CMS could bring to the enterprise.

Earlier in his career, Parish worked for 10 years at Motorola Semiconductor, where he was technology manager for information systems for the Technology Labs. That's where he learned about coordinating international project teams and the value of working across borders. At Motorola, Parish worked with teams in India, China, and South America. Today, Parish, who lives in Austin, Texas, is working on 10 separate Web sites -- his own and those his clients' -- and with three Plone teams. One team, his primary group for his own business, in the Ukraine, and the others are in Kansas and California.

So how does Ukraine enter the picture? "As I started hunting around for places to host the Plone products I realized I needed to find an ISP that specialized in this area. My first partnership was with the Quintagroup in the Ukraine. Their business goal is to build Plone CMS solutions along with any Plone applications needed for each customer. They don't do PHP or other types of lanquages, o nly Zope and Plone. (By following the provided link, if you are unfamiliar with Zope, you'll learn that it is "... a leading Open Source Application Server and Content Management Framework, specializing in content management solutions, portal content management, and custom applications.")

"For some people, this would have been a problem -- partnering with a company in the Ukraine. I was OK with giving it a try. Luckily, while at Motorola Semiconductor for 10 years, I learned how to collaborate with teams globally. In fact, it was a requirement to learn how to do this to progress in Motorola. I worked with Web teams in China, India, Russia, and South America.... I didn't fully appreciate the pain of the learning curve back then, but now I do. Learning how to work with other human beings in different cultures, different countries, different time zones, and different languages is now more important than ever. It's unfortunate it's not taught in schools."

Parish believes that all IT Managers need to learn about working across borders and dealing with development teams from other cultures. One way to do this would be to study how global companies like Motorola train their managers to work with these teams.

Parish said his original business Web site had been produced on Dreamweaver by an outside designer but soon hit a wall. "The process was getting more complex as the site became larger and the use of CSS and includes became more pervasive." That was the point at which he knew he had to migrate to a CMS if his business was going to continue to grow and meet the expectations of prospective corporate clients. It was while researching CMSes and considering the cost-benefit ratio of each that he stumbled upon the Plone platform.

"A friend of mine kept urging me to look at Plone. I was intrigued because practically all CMS solutions I knew about required tens of thousands of dollars.

"When I was searching around for some early wins with Plone, before I committed?too many clients to the platform, I found out that the Office of the Governor of Texas has a large public Web site [built on Plone], and now the City of Austin is moving all their external Web sites into Plone.

"I got in touch with the webmaster for Governor Perry's site and found out they were getting over one million visitors a month. That ... satified my immediate needs for performance.?He also said that many of the people assigned to keeping a huge amount of detail updated only had a high school education. Plone was so easy to use it just worked -- and worked well for them. He's right, it's about as difficult as creating a Gmail or Yahoo mail message."

The other fortuituous thing about living and working in the technology hub that Austin, Texas, has become over the years is that Parish was in close proximity and got to know Alan Runyan of Enfold Systems, one of the three creators of Plone. Runyan told Parish that one of the goals of Plone is to have Zope as ubiquitous as possible. Runyan said, "We want to take over the mid-tier CMS market."

Runyan told us, "The most obvious benefit Plone brings an IT department is the well-designed user interface. IT departments can deploy Plone across a large user base with little to no end user training required. Evaluation of the system is easy. Upon downloading the Windows installer you can have an evaluation system up and running in under 10 minutes. Plone's aim is to be the Macintosh of Content Management Systems.

"Since Plone is open source, IT departments have the option of customizing it themselves and being in control of their content management deployment, or they can partner with companies like Enfold Systems that can help customize and provide knowledge transfer of the Plone ecosystem.

"My favorite benefit is the new separation of content management from delivery aspects offered by Plone's Entransit component. Now its possible to manage content using Plone but delivering content using PHP, Java, or .Net. I think Entransit and some of the upcoming community component releases show that it's a no-brainer value that Plone and its community provides to IT departments."

When pressed for any challenges he might have experienced working with a Ukrainian development team, Parish responded: "Plone is a Web document management application that runs on top of Zope. Zope is a platform for building all sorts of sophisticated network-centric applications that need intelligence about the objects being transfered, manipulated or managed by a user. The idea is Plone hides all the details under the Zope hood so the user can focus almost completely on creating and managing content..

"A couple of years ago the Zope/Plone community was pretty programming-oriented. I had trouble finding a Zope/Plone hosting company that was business-oriented versus developer-oriented. I ended up with Quintagroup because they clearly understood the requirements of a business, support and enterprise issues.

"I bit the bullet and had them move my site over with the existing design. They did it in two weeks. From that day forward it's like being on Cloud Nine with regards to managing, contenting, and growing the site in new directions. Sure we've had a few bumps along the way and I'm always tinkering. But Plone has a pretty nice safety net build in. In fact, you can undo a number of operations that you don't like, deleting a document or changing the permissions on the document so [other users] cannot access it anymore."

Does Parish believe that migrating from Dreamweaver to Plone has helped expand his business and his client base? Did his enterprise profit from the migration -- the important metric whenever deciding to change techniques? "I wanted the abilty to create drafts of Web?documents online and have another person log-in with lower permissions and access levels who's only task it is to edit my work. I wanted the ability to assign different levels of access to the site and documents and different states of completion so I could define a workflow. Finally, I wanted everything to work together including RSS and blogging so it's integrated and not a hodgepodge of C and PHP technologies all stuck together.

"I also wanted the ability to add and modify all the menu navigation items at any time from a Web browser and I wanted to be able to make changes to meta tags all from a browser. Dreamweaver required me to work with one page at a time. You pull a copy down, edit it, then you have to transfer it back but -- be careful! -- you might screw up something that will cause the rest of the Web site to not work correctly. That process would totally kill any creative urge to post content when I had a good idea.? I wanted the ability to build the site more organically and less painfully and without the expense of a Web master sitting at my side when something doesn't work right. I knew that there were CMS solutions around. Plone was the one that had the most features and most power. It was a no-brainer."

1. The Plone CMS is worth consideration for IT teams trained to work globally.
2. Extensible Web systems are part of the future of the global marketplace. Localization is now key to future development on this medium, the Web, as the enterprise becomes increasingly more global.
3. As Parish's experience demonstrates, in order to build a rich Web experience and a more interactive approach toward its customers, the enterprise needs to move to the more communitarian approaches offered by new CMS platforms.