Plone for Intranet and Knowledge Management: Digital Sovereignty Without Vendor or Cloud Lock-in
As organizations grow, their knowledge becomes spread across more and more systems: portal, wiki, document management, forums, chat. Two governance problems arise at the same time — central IT operates a growing number of systems with often inconsistent permissions, and at the content level, outdated material sits on an equal footing with current material, often in different systems. On top of that, projects frequently face considerable time pressure: vendors are pushing towards the cloud through licensing models and feature policy — Atlassian has already discontinued its server products, and at Microsoft new functionality appears first in M365 and Copilot. For organizations that in part operate critical infrastructure, the associated loss of control — extending as far as internal data ending up in cloud-based AI services — is not an option.
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This talk shows why intranet and knowledge management belong on a common platform — and why Plone is an excellent basis for this. Communication and knowledge management are at heart the same thing: durable, accountable knowledge. On a single platform, that means: a curated portal and agile wiki workspaces on the same foundation, a legally compliant search across all systems, a content lifecycle that keeps content demonstrably up to date — operated on your own infrastructure, without vendor lock-in and without being forced into the cloud. Structured content and consistent permissions are at the same time the prerequisite for reliable AI answers (RAG) on your own infrastructure.
We share what we have learned from our work over the past 15 years with large knowledge organizations (research institutions such as Forschungszentrum Jülich and federal agencies such as the Federal Office for Radiation Protection): where Plone is strong, where its limits lie, and what matters when introducing it.