Category Archives: Consulting

Plone CMF being used by BMC

Consulting

I read an interesting article this afternoon at IT Managers Journal where again Plone was being utilized in enterprize business. The site is TalkBMC if you don’t want to find it in the article. For me one of the more visable deployments of Plone is with Ubuntu. A great distribution and one I currently use.

It’s always nice to know sometimes the ideas one has is also seen by others in the IT world. In a previous post I commented how Plone helped me create a proof of concept intranet in 2001. It is still used today all be it not adopted or supported by the company… such a rebel I am !!! But that’s ok their are many choices in the content management application arena and it is only one.

See the entire list at Plone Sites.

Ethereal fitting in

Consulting

As I have mentioned a few times my current employer is a Microsoft shop so I was suprised a week ago when at our fall conference when I saw Ethereal on a big screen in the sales room. I thought to myself hummmmmm, isn’t that interesting. A laptop running KDE on Linux using Ethereal to provide a baseline for security discussions on secure and open networks. Now Ethereal does run on Windows but it struck me as just a little funny Linux was on the projector all week.

I’m glad to see we are open to alternatives.. ;)

Open Source and CMS

Consulting,

As I talk with customers every day more and more information is moving to the web. Either an application from a software provider, a business process from a supplier or vendor, and even the customer themselves. Yes the web has been around for a while and this might seem like old news but from a business perspective sharing information over a public channel has been somewhat scary. However for the information that can be and should be shared internally, externally or both there are some very fine open source products to help.

Late 2001 I started a side project, for a proof of concept, to create an intranet for then department with my currnet employer. My requirements were it needed to be web based, users with accounts could post documents, and anyone can search to find information. In my search I found a number of CMS (Content Management Software) applications but only one stood out, Plone. What caught my eye the most was it’s UI, it conformed to all web standards and was usable in any browser. Now that didn’t mean a lot to the company, were’re a Microsoft shop, but it was important to me. Not to mention the fact is was a GPL product and the whole project would cost $0.00.
That was good cause I was completely on my own with no resources from the company.

The backend of Plone is Zope which is a great tool itself for building intranets and interactive sites from scratch. The pro’s I found were:

  • Considerable room for customization
  • Submission workflow so that posts can be reviewed prior to publishing
  • Users can be assigned different permissions which control access
  • Keyword association for like documents
  • Plain text, formatted text, html or proprietary document formats can be posted
  • Separate directory tree display for folder structure view
  • Ports for Linux, Windows, Mac, and BSD

The con’s were not that many:

  • Not current Linux distribution friendly, one to two distros behind
  • For non programmers could be difficult to modify or customize

Needless to say it has been a great learning expierence and has been well received. After 6 months the site had 25 different catagories of information with a total of 200 + pages of documentation, news, a calendar and a place for members personal web pages. And all of it came from the vanilla setup.

If you are looking for a CMS type solution on any major platform consider Plone.