David Siedband is a Plone developer who's been working with environmental groups at the grassroots level. While a large entity such as The Nature Conservancy may move slowly in adopting new technologies, state and local groups can respond much more quickly and may not be subject to the same legal restrictions in terms of sharing land data. Those groups are moving ahead with embracing audio and video and when new forays into technology prove successful, those moves can "bubble up from the field" and later be taken on by the likes of The Nature Conservancy, Siedband and Kleinfeldt noted.

Utah State University is using Plone as the content management system for its eduCommons OpenCourseWare management system. EduCommons helps universities develop and manage educational material from their undergraduate and graduate courses that they've decided to make available to everyone for free online. The university has done a lot of work around dealing with copyright issues and is donating that effort back to Plone.

Universities in Cuba, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States are already using eduCommons and Utah State is in discussions with universities in China, said David Ray, developer at the University's Center for Open and Sustainable Learning. Software vendor Novell's global training services unit is also a fan of eduCommons, using it to make educational material available for its Novell authorized courses and other customer training information.

Novell also uses Plone to power its novell.com Web site. The company turned to Plone after finding Web content management software from Vignette didn't provide the functionality the software vendor was looking for in terms of support for multiple languages and different types of content.

Nathan Sandland, an independent consultant, has been helping Novell adopt Plone and notes two other teams within the vendor are also using the open source content management software.

As Plone users get to grips with Zope 3 and start becoming familiar with Plone 3, there's another issue to consider: when the open source software will move to the latest version of the GNU general public license (GPL). Plone is currently made available under GPLv2, while GPLv3 debuted at the end of June. The topic's likely to be on the agenda at the annual Plone Conference due to take place in Naples, Italy, in October.