What is Plone?

Plone is a powerful, flexible web collaboration and publishing system that makes it possible for nontechnical people—staff, students, researchers, faculty—to easily create and update web content.

In many cases, Plone has replaced products such as SharePoint, RedDot, Drupal, Vignette, Ektron, or TeamSpace for intranets, public websites, and systems for document management, digital asset management, and knowledge management.

How Plone Can Benefit Your Organization

Costs

Plone significantly lowers the costs of setup, maintenance, and customization because the nonprofit Plone Foundation protects Plone's open source intellectual property, you can avoid vendor lock-in and costly proprietary software licenses for the following: 

• Server
  
• Cluster
• Database
• Search
• Forms 
• Server-Client Access
• Client Access 
• Public Internet Access 

Improving Business Processes

Plone enables simple self-service publishing, without the dreaded webmaster/IT bottleneck, automates business processes and workflow, and makes it easy re-use and share content across your organization—and with other organizations.

Streamline and Automate

Plone can simplify your business processes with

• easy-to-use forms and workflow to ensure that the publication process meets your requirements
• re-use and sharing of content across your organization, and with other organizations 
• collaboration on content creation and maintenance 
• integration with enterprise databases, course management, and systems such as Active Directory, Salesforce, and Oracle

Plone can handle many different content needs

In many cases, Plone has replaced products such as Sharepoint, Red Dot, Drupal, Vignette, Ektron, and TeamSpace for Intranets, public websites, and systems for document management, digital asset management, and knowledge management.

It's Open Source

The open software and community give you great flexibility to customize Plone for your needs. The Plone community includes the Plone Foundation; more than 200 core developers; and more than 300 providers of training, support, enhancements, and consulting in 57 countries.  

Security

As an open source product, a large number of developers frequently scrutinize the code for any potential security issues. This proactive approach is better than the wait-and-see approach in proprietary software that relies on keeping security issues a secret instead of resolving them outright.

Based on Python and the Zope libraries, Plone has a technological edge that has has helped it attain the best security track record of any major CMS (Source: CVE). In fact, security is a major reason why many CMS users are switching to Plone.