OpenText Content Suite Platform vs. Plone

Great for content management and records even for organizations whose staff are not much experienced in the technical backgrounds as it's easy to use and no previous knowledge on HTML is required. It is great for storing invoices and payment proofs and for organizations dealing with global clients for general use documents.

Incentivized

The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.

• Document Management is being done well since it allows you to put in a corporate folder structure that applies to the business unit you currently work in.
• Records Management works well in this organisation as it allows you to classify the document according to the file plan, as well as manage it according to the retention schedule for tat file plan.
• The ability to collaborate on files works really well. You can share with users within your group, as well as allow other users access to the files for either read access to read/write access.
• Access control of the folder and even individual files allows you to ensure only necessary people can have the right type of access. This is especially welcome in the government environment where document management is of utmost importance.

Incentivized

• Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
• Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
• Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.

• The user interface and configurability of that interface lack a lot of flexibility and modern tools.
• There needs to be stronger and more powerful integration to electronic forms and workflow capabilities which are core to modern ECM.
• Management of audit and content history needs to be modernized and made more dynamic and sustainable.

Incentivized

• Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
• Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
• Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).

The staff is comfortable with it and I doubt they'd change at this point.

Incentivized

We have critical systems running on Plone so will need it in the future.

Free to use since its Open source, so we don't have to worry about licence costs.

We know how to use and develop Plone and it has no limits.

Strong for Core Content and Records Management
Effective for Non-Technical Users (with the right configuration)

Incentivized

Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small.

The new user interface in Plone 6 is even better, it is super fast, has lots of different blocks for enhancing the page, has flexible layout system and is easy to extend with more features.

I never had any issues with access internally or via VPN. But, the response via VPN, was a bit slow.

Incentivized

Our Plone sites are very robust. We have critical systems on Plone and we have been running sites on Plone for over 20 years with very little unexpected downtime.

• I used OpenText nearly every day and I never had any performance issues that I can recall. That said, it's not terribly fast either.

Incentivized

Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.

OpenText has an outstanding support and knowledge base. All problems which couldn't be solved by us (high complexity cases) were promptly resolved and the resolution also shared with us.

Incentivized

There are not too many Plone companies in the world. But the ones who are, are high level professionals

I have been participating Plone training and the trainers have always been professional. Materials were good and the instructions clear

Well organized, professional training with good materials and instructions

No, it's pretty easy to implement and use.

Incentivized

Having used OpenText Content Suite for a long time, I can say it stands the competition. It offers many versions which is unlike many products in its category. Also, while it is not affordable, I believe the cost is justified considering what a business can achieve with this software.

Incentivized

Drupal: Plone is cheaper, so with Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However, Drupal has a lower learning curve WordPress: For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone. Joomla, is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better

Incentivized

Plone has no limits. We have massive sites and can run them just fine

• With OpenText Content Suite, we can easily keep documents safe
• Document collaboration is easy with OpenText
• We can easily handle invoicing and automation thanks to features such as content capture and imaging.
• With OpenText Content Suite, there is better file sync and archiving

Incentivized

• The impact Plone has had at the University of Oshkosh is as follows: this software allows student workers to learn about IT departments and CMS's in a user-friendly way. It gives many students great jobs that look great on their resumes.
• Since there are great training manuals for Plone, there is increased employee efficient in the workplace. Training doesn't take long, and if there's ever a question, the Plone manual is a great tool to refer to.
• If an employee using Plone quits, its easy to find someone to replace them with quick training and great resources.