BRISTOL, UK: Open Source CMS (Content Management Systems) providers from the Plone community kicked off the annual Plone Conference in which one of the largest gatherings of Plone developers, users, and business leaders met to educate users on the state of Plone and to discuss the future of the system.

Plone allows non-technical end-users to manage web content efficiently, and has replaced products like Sharepoint, Red Dot and Vignette for systems such as departmental intranets, document management systems and public websites for organisations like Oxfam, Novell, and NASA.

Over 300 people from all around the world attended the conference with five days of training, talks, and seminars followed by a further two days of 'development sprints'. Attendees took the opportunity of having such a large proportion of the development community in one location to work together on future aspects of the software.

The event also played host to the election of the Plone Foundation Board - an annually appointed group tasked with protecting the intellectual property and trademarks of Plone, and promoting Plone to a wider audience. One of the successful candidates to be voted on to the board was Matt Hamilton, Technical Director from Netsight in Bristol.

Matt was among seven of the most influential Plone community members to make the 2008 board. His established experience of Plone within the enterprise environment and his team's track record of successfully deploying Plone within a wide range of companies throughout the UK and Europe, puts him in an ideal position in the board to further promote Plone.

Matt is amongst many in the quest to educate all organisations - from SMEs to large enterprises, public sector bodies to NGOs - about the significant advantages of using Open Source Software - particularly Open Source Content Management Systems.

He commented, "Plone is an excellent choice for all organisations that need to manage the increasing volume of business data, and it is becoming increasingly valuable to enterprise-level businesses. It's very low initial acquisition costs and highly transparent deployment costs - combined of course with outstanding technical capabilities - make it a very attractive alternative to the often overweight and expensive proprietary alternatives".

It is due to the hard work and dedication of Open Source communities such as Plone that many organisations are becoming clearer about the potential cost saving, flexibility, and technical capabilities that Open Source Content Management Solutions software can bring to their web based projects.