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Cost is generally not the biggest issue. Your boss is probably against FOSS because most Pay-For-Play software generally comes with support & maintenance contracts issued from the people who wrote the software, which are extremely important to management types, while software like Plone requires a support or maintenance contract through a third-party provider (i found this: http://plone.net/providers )

If you can convince him that the best way for him to handle this situation and all potential future ones is purchasing a third-party support contract which can also be supported by you if need be since the software is open source, then you might have a shot. Otherwise, I'm not sure. I've seen a lot of good software packages turned down as solutions to business problems simply because there was no support contract.

Plone is quite popular and actively developed. Plone.net is a directory that lists many Internet portals and websites deployed with Plone.

Nowadays, it's pretty simple to setup a hosting environment for it using buildout, a system based on plain text templates that automatically builds and configures Plone instances for you, fetching dependencies as needed.

There are plenty of examples of web services running on Open Source for 'enterprise' use - groupware, CRM, accounting, the works. Some of these packages are very good.

Its hard to be specific/determine what you're trying to do without knowing more specifics as to what you're looking for. Of the groupware projects I'm aware of, I know the following have a fair amount of support/use:

* Plone CMS
* OBM
* eGroupWare
* Drupal
* Typo3

Of these, I know that Plone, Drupal, and Typo3 are all "platforms" for developing, managing, and extending content. I seem to recall either eGroupWare or OpenGroupWare extend/integrate with MS Office products. No, it's not going to be the level of integration that Sharepoint stuff offers, but it's something to mention, at any rate (and isn't going to have the massive licensing costs + perpetual lock-in that a MS solution has*).

Plone, in particular, has a lot of support and corporate/"enterprise" use. From their site:

Plone is among the top 2% of all open source projects worldwide, with 200 core developers and more than 300 solution providers in 57 countries. The project has been actively developed since 2001, is available in more than 40 languages, and has the best security track record of any major CMS.
It is owned by the Plone Foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, and is available for all major operating systems.
Sources: CVE and Ohloh.

That alone is impressive enough; but also consider some of the notable companies which utilize Plone in/for a variety of purposes:

Akamai (yeah, that Akamai - the guys who load balance Microsoft web servers)

Nokia (QT Software stuff)

MyCity ("real time monitoring system for Cities, Towns, Districts or utilities. It makes use of the GPRS service offered by the various GSM network operators")

Discover Magazine

Novell, Inc. (for enterprise services)

NASAScience (public site for NASA's Science Mission Directorate)

FSF (yeah, those hippies)

universities, university science/it departments, hospitals, public/government sites... the list goes on.

Those are notable company names, and at least in the case of Akamai, Novell and Nokia, everyone in IT should know about them. They're also some fairly diverse (and expansive) implementations using the same central CMS - and they're not shackled to a single software backend, able to run on any OS and server combination they could imagine.

* The cost factor associated with MS solution lock-in is a big consideration, bigger than just a simple argument of something like "OpenOffice vs. MS Office". With a web-based, top-level technology like this, it's much, much more important to keep the technologies used "open" - because it is the top-level interface to all your data. You can not move away from a closed package on the backend without moving the entire system, at once, to something open (more often than not, with MS). You're basically stuck with that stack unless you want to start over; there's no ability to independently consider parts of the stack and replace them, as there often is with open systems.

Plone (http://plone.org) is a CMS that you can use to setup a portal or intranet with features similar as Google Docs. In fact, there's a module that let you write math using latex format: http://plone.org/products/latex-math-image

Plone is not only open source, but has a strong support from its community as any successful FLOSS project and also professional provided by a network of business and people in more than 60 countries as you can check in http://plone.net/

It's really handy that I can open my World Wide Web browser, and using TCP/IP, navigate to discovermagazine.com which uses PLONE running on Linux to serve an an HTML document telling me how useless open-source software is.

(cite: http://plone.net/case-studies/discover-magazine)

Hi :)

Thanks for recommending my book. Although I am being paid royalties, the main motivation was precisely what you identified: we need more, and better documentation. I think this is a problem that affects quite a few open source projects, though.

I won't claim that Plone (or Zope) is small and lightweight (I do quite like Pylons, though). I do, however, find it to be one of the most productive tools I've ever used for delivering a certain type of solution - what I call "content-centric" systems. The book is very much about that. I think this type of problem fits many business use cases, perhaps better than enthusiast/single-person use cases. I run my blog in Plone, and it was a two-minute job to set up, but if all you want is a simple web site, then Plone may be overkill. Similarly, if you want to build an intranet or a complex multi-author publishing platform or a bespoke portal where semi-structured content will be key, Plone may be a good fit.

The single most important reason to love Plone, though, is the community. I have some incredibly good friends in the Plone community (and outside... I do occasionally leave IRC), individuals whom I respect and admire greatly. People are friendly, constructive and helpful, and we all actively welcome new contributors and interested parties. If you found Plone frustrating, and you're able to put that into the language of constructive criticism, we'd love to hear from you (http://plone.org/support) so that we can improve the system. We're not perfect, but we are also proud of what Plone does.

By the way, if you want to read a pretty in-depth and interesting case study of a Plone implementation, take a look at http://plone.net/case-studies/discover-magazine. Obviously it's favourable (and I'm biased), but it may give you a good flavour.

Cheers,

Open your mind to the possibility that you just haven't found a use-case for Plone, or that you just don't know enough about Plone to know when it is a good fit.

Many others have: http://plone.net/sites .

There *are* hundreds of thousands of people using it, millions even, see: http://plone.net/sites. Akamai, Novell, CIA, Discover Magazine, to name a few.

I'd like to point out the sites currently running Plone:

http://plone.net/sites

Novell, Trolltech, CIA, Akamai, Discovery Magazine, Oxfam -- these are hardly small sites.

If you're going to troll, please at least troll on something that is close to the truth. :)

For the record, this contest was done by Discover Magazine, which is NOT the same thing as Discovery Channel. One additional note on the DiscoverMagazine.com website that could be of interest to Slashdot readers is that it was built on an open source content management system - Plone.