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 - VR
Example
• 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