We're pleased to share the news that ONE/Northwest has been awarded a $25,000 Development Grant from the Salesforce.com Foundation to fund the integration of Plone, a powerful and user-friendly open source content management system, with the Salesforce.com database platform.

The result of this project will be code that enables nonprofits (and others!) using Plone and Salesforce.com to:

• Authenticate users of a Plone website against user data stored in Salesforce.com
• Store new user website registrations in Salesforce.com
• Allow website users to update profile information stored in Salesforce.com

We expect to deliver the integration code by October 2006, and plan to make several milestone releases. 

This kind of deep integration between applications is made possible by the forward-looking architectural decisions of both the Salesforce.com and Plone design teams.  We'll be making extensive use of the Salesforce.com Web Services API, which allows outside applications to read and write data in Salesforce.com.   On the Plone side, we'll be using PlonePAS (Pluggable Auth System), which allows Plone to read and write user data from external data.

We'll be working with Enfold Systems, a Plone development shop founded by Plone co-founder Alan Runyan.  Enfold are the creators of PlonePAS, and have extensive experience integrating Plone with other nonprofit-centric software platforms including GetActive and DemocracyInAction.