Running a Small Business with Plone

Sally Kleinfeldt, Jazkarta

Jazkarta

• Open source technology web applications

• Hosted solutions, consulting services, training and support

• Plone, Zope, Python experts

• Three full time, 5+ part time staff

• Staff distributed across multiple locations

Plone Is Our Business

• Our income is mostly from Plone-based products and services

• We use our own products and services to run our business

Aspects of Running a Business

• Operations

• Marketing/Sales

• Customers

Operations

• Finance, records

• Quickbooks (traditional)

• Day to day work environment

• Home offices, shared work spaces (no bricks and mortar)

Work Environment

• Distributed work environment makes communication and collaboration key

• Email

• Chat

• Calendars

• Document management

Google Apps

• Jazkarta.com domain

• Gmail, chat, calendar, docs/spreadsheets, sites, start page

• Search across all personal content

• Standard Edition free, Premier Edition $50/user/year

• Education, non-profits get special deals

Gmail:Good UI, Great Search

Google Calendar:Supports iCal Standard

Google Docs:For Staff & Customers

Google Docs:Collaborative Editing

Google Docs:Spreadsheet to Form

Google Docs:Offline with Gears

Dropbox:Shared Filesystem

Google Start Page: Personal Dashboard

Google Sites:Company Intranet

Google Apps

• What does this have to do with Plone?

Google Apps + Plone

• Rich APIs for integration

• Embed a Google Doc form on a page

• Import Google Calendar to Plone Calendar

• More examples later

Marketing & Sales

• Internet plus word of mouth

• Website

• Ads

• Emails

• Managing customer relations

• Managing sales

Website:Plone

• Full featured content management system

• Rich content with a marketing slant - products, services, news, team, case studies, newsletters, blog posts, etc.

• Many add-ons

• Secure, robust

• Plone provides our public persona

Plone Hosting

• Requirements

• Reliability

• Scalability

• Ease of management

Plone in the Cloud

• Hosted on Amazon EC2

• Buildout and fabric for deployment

• Data.fs and Apache logs use Elastic Block Storage

• Backups use S3 storage

• 5 virtual servers: Apache/Pound/Varnish, ZEO, 3 clients

Advertising:Google Adwords

Emails:Vertical Response

CRM:Salesforce

• Best of breed hosted solution (SaaS)

• Powerful API that promotes integration

• Manage contacts, leads, accounts, campaigns, business opportunities

Salesforce Out of the Box

• Gmail - email Contacts

• Google Docs - associate proposals, contracts with Accounts

• Google Adwords - integrate with Campaigns

• Vertical Response - email Leads

• PayPal - pay for products

Salesforce + Plone

• Salesforce Connector

• PloneFormGen

• SalesForceAdapter

• For details see Andrew Burkhalter’s talk at 9:30 Thursday

Plone - Salesforce - VRExample

• Plone form to capture prospective customer’s interest

• Data goes into customized Salesforce Lead

• Add Leads to Campaign

• Send targeted information to Leads - training announcements, product announcements, newsletters

Customers

• Flexible scope projects using agile methodologies

• Multiple customers, projects, developers, project managers

Project Management:ClueMapper

• Super-charged Trac across multiple projects

• Hosted on Amazon EC2

• Personal dashboard showing all projects

• Enhanced web-based management

• AJAX UI for entering time

• Lightning Talk today

ClueMapper:Future Plans

• Integrate with 3rd party time tracking products

• Harvest (Hosted solution)

• SlimTimer (Trac plugin)

• Integrate time tracking with QuickBooks

Conclusion

• Plone + Salesforce + Google Apps + ClueMapper makes a powerful combination

• Use Plone for the things it does well

• Integrate other best of breed components

• Choose the right tool for the task

Questions?

sallly@jazkarta