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.
