This is very helpful - thanks!
One can cite that the Royal Bank of Scotland, FBI, CIA and NASA are
using Plone, and Plone is on the list of approved and secure platforms
for use at NASA.
I know one of the questions that will come up is examples of sites
where the platform is used in the enterprise, govenment, or major
educational settings. Basically, what are the "major wins" for Plone
in those 3 areas in 2009?
Other topics that will likely come up on the panel:
* Shoot down common misconceptions about open source in general
* Discussion of the "single company model" (Alfresco) vs. the
"democratic foundation model" (Plone) vs. hybrid (Drupal)
and the differences between community and company driven
projects
* How does an enterprise properly evaluate open source
platforms? How is that evaluation different than with
proprietary systems?
* General compliance issues
* Plone's approach to workflow vs. the other platforms
* Why and when should companies contribute back to the
project? What's the value? Examples.
* Standards such as CMIS and RDF, why they're important, and
when are they not really important.
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Nate Aune <na...@jazkarta.com
<mailto:na...@jazkarta.com>> wrote:
I've been putting together a "10 Things that make Plone a good
choice
for the enterprise" factsheet, and have come up with the following
talking points. Many of these echo the excellent ones that Ken
already posted in his email.
1) Security
Since Plone is built on top of Zope and Zope uses a security model
similar to Unix, the security and permissioning can be very
granular.
Since Zope uses the ZODB, you don't have to worry about SQL
injection
exploits.
One can cite that the Royal Bank of Scotland, FBI, CIA and
NASA are
using Plone, and Plone is on the list of approved and secure
platforms
for use at NASA.
There are the CVE graphs from the IBM report comparing Plone
security
track record to other CMSes and frameworks.
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/iss/xforce/midyearreport/xforce-midyear-report-2008.pdf
The "Hardening Plone" howto on Plone.org is an excellent document
about how to lock down Plone even more for highly secure
environments.
http://plone.org/documentation/how-to/securing-plone
And the accompanying talk from the recent Plone conference
which was a
use case of a high-security Plone solution, which was audited and
approved for handling sensitive data from a multi-billion
industry.
http://www.slideshare.net/khink/hardening-plone-a-militarystrength-cms
Zope is very secure
http://zope2.zope.org/about-zope-2/six-reasons-for-using-zope/zope-is-secure
2) Scalability
At the recent Plone conference, we heard case studies about
sites that
have millions of page views per day and hundreds/thousands of
users
logging into the site. I'd like to collect these case studies
(perhaps
on plone.net? <http://plone.net?>), so when potential
customers ask for real data, we can
produce reports that show Plone can scale.
Since it's built on top of Zope, Plone has built-in load
distribution
using ZEO (Zope Enterprise Objects)
http://zope2.zope.org/about-zope-2/six-reasons-for-using-zope/zope-is-highly-scalable
With Plone 4, we get plone.app.blob which stores large files
on the
file system. Even Sharepoint can't do this OOTB without an
expensive
add-on product.
Plone has built-in caching and with CacheFu, we can send purge
requests to an upstream caching proxy such as Squid or Varnish.
Load tests can be written easily with Funkload to test before and
after performance optimizations using collective.funkbot.
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.funkbot
With RelStorage, you can use Plone with any RDBMS including MySQL,
PostgreSQL and Oracle and take advantage of these database
clustering
and redundancy capabilities. See Shane Hathaway's recent blog post
about performance improvements when using RelStorage.
http://shane.willowrise.com/archives/relstorage-1-4-0b1-and-zodbshootout/
3) Interoperability
Since it's written in Python, Plone can talk to just about any
backend
system, from relational databases to authentication services
to web
services, and can be integrated with 3rd party search engines.
The Salesforce.com integration is the best of any open source tool
available today. David Glick from GroundWire gave a good
overview at
the PloneConf.
http://www.slideshare.net/davisagli/integrating-plone-with-ecommerce-and-relationship-management-a-case-study-in-plone-getpaid-and-salesforcecom
Because Plone ships with PlonePAS - pluggable authentication
service,
it can authenticate users against Active Directory, LDAP,
OpenID, SQL
or even Gmail.
Plone's built-in search tool can be easily replaced with the open
source Solr search tool which provides faceted search and
enterprise
level search capabilities. Andi Zeidler gave a lightning talk
at the
PloneConf about how easy it is to integrate.
http://plone.org/products/collective.solr
Massimo from RedTurtle gave a talk at the European Plone Symposium
about integrating Google Apps / Google Docs with Plone
http://www.slideshare.net/massimo.azzolini/googledocs-on-plone
Sally Kleinfeldt from Jazkarta organized a panel discussion about
Plone and web services at the PloneConf and has also blogged
about it.
http://blog.jazkarta.com/2009/08/07/plone-web-services-things-are-looking-up/
http://blog.jazkarta.com/2009/10/27/plone-web-services-what-about-cmis/
4) Data portability
Moving your Plone database to another provider is usually just a
matter of copying the Data.fs file and tar up the eggs/products
directory. Makes it very easy to switch to a different hosting
provider / vendor if you're not satisfied with your current one.
Besides using the web services APIs mentioned above to get
data in and
out of Plone, one can also leverage ContentMirror, which will
serialize and replicate all the content in Plone into a relational
database asynchronously. See Kapil's talk about it at last year's
Plone Symposium.
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dntgmzf_17547q5j3wq
enpraxis.static site is an add-on for Plone that lets you easily
create a static HTML snapshot of your entire Plone site.
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/enpraxis.staticsite
Also, using new tools such as Transmogrifier and Funnelweb (which
builds on top of Transmogrifier) it's even easier to get data
in and
out of Plone.
See Lennart's talk from the PloneConf about Transmogriier.
http://www.slideshare.net/regebro/transmogrifier-migrating-to-plone-with-less-pain-2387600
And the project page for Funnelweb, which gives you a TTW
interface
for importing static sites into Plone.
http://www.coactivate.org/projects/funnelweb/project-home
5) Accessibility
Plone is the most accessible open source CMS available on the
market.
Conforms to Section 508 which is a requirement for all government
agencies and W3C accessibility guidelines. The functionality
gracefully degrades on older browsers, or when using a
screenreader.
http://plone.org/products/plone/features/3.0/existing-features/accessibility-compliant/
and http://plone.org/accessibility-info
An all-too-often forgotten aspect when people construct web
sites is
how accessible these sites are to the blind and
sight/motor-impaired.
Plone was probably the first CMS out there that focused on
accessibility. With the ruling that web sites can be sued for not
providing access to the blind, things have changed for
government and
corporations who provide information to the public through their
websites.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/target-sued-over-web-access-blind-917
Aaron VanDerlip from Jazkarta gave a talk about Plone and
accessibility at the PloneConf 2006
http://plone.org/events/conferences/seattle-2006/presentations/plone-and-accessibility
6) Internationalization and multilingual content
Plone already supports over 50 languages out-of-the-box and with
Python 2.6 excellent handling of Unicode, we can support multibyte
languages as well such as Chinese, and even right-to-left (RTL)
languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.
Using the LinguaPlone add-on you can translate the content of your
Plone site into any language, and even export the content in
standard
XLIFF format for hand-off to a professional translation
agency. after
they've done the translations, they send back XLIFF files
which can
then be imported into Plone. See Sasha's presentation on this
from the
PloneConf.
http://www.slideshare.net/valentineweb/manage-multilingual-sites
There was a lightning talk at the Plone conference about an
in-place
translation tool that made it possible to translate the message
strings in the Plone interface just by clicking on them, and
then this
could be exported to a .po file.
7) Theming and branding
Plone already has excellent separation of presentation and
content,
and almost any element in the Plone interface can be styled
using only
CSS. With Deliverance, we have an even easier theming story,
and the
possibility to theme multiple applications using the same static
HTML/CSS design. Now any design can be made to work with Plone
with
minimal effort - simply add some rules to the Deliverance
rules file
to wire up content generated by Plone into placeholders in the
theme.
See my presentation from the Plone symposium (conference
slides to be
posted shortly)
http://www.slideshare.net/Jazkarta/deliverance-plone-theming-without-the-learning-curve-from-plone-symposium-east-2009
8) Hosting
Plone can be hosted on any platform including Linux, BSD,
Windows or
Mac OSX. Basically any platform that can run Python will work.
Plone can be hosted on a VPS, a dedicated server or virtual
machines
on Amazon EC2 or using Ubuntu's Enterprise Cloud.
http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private
Using GenericSetup, it's very easy to capture site configuration
settings, and programatically replicate the site on a different
instance.
Using buildout it's very easy to make repeatable deployments
so that
you can easily replicate a development environment, push it to
staging
and finally production.
See Tarek's excellent presentation on this subject:
http://www.slideshare.net/tarek.ziade/delivering-applications-with-zcbuildout-and-a-distributed-model-plone-conference-2008-presentation
A new development by Dylan Jay is collective.hostout which is
a series
of buildout recipes for defining your hosting settings
directly in the
buildout configuration file.
http://www.slideshare.net/djay/collectivehostout-how-to-host-a-python-app-for-20-in-20min
We've also started working on an Amazon AMI, VMWare and VirtualBox
images of Plone to make it even easier to evaluate and get Plone
hosted on a server quickly and using best practices.
9) Open source
Similar to Linux, Apache, Firefox and many other popular software
tools, Plone is open source. Open source is a methodology to
programming that puts great emphasis on community development.
Rather
than one firm or organization building a particular product,
an open
source project can be built by a variety of individuals or
companies.
We like open source because it helps us stop trying to
reinvent the
wheel and instead choose the best of breed systems for our
clients and
deliver them at an affordable price.
Plone has won 3 years in a row the Best Other CMS Award from
Packt Publishing
http://plone.org/news/plone-wins-packt-2009-cms-award
Martin Aspeli wrote about Plone: a model of a mature open source
product for his MSc dissertation for Analysis, Design and
Management
of Information Systems course at the London School of Economics.
http://martinaspeli.net/publications/Plone%20-%20A%20Model%20of%20a%20Mature%20Open%20Source%20Project.pdf
10) Foundation backed international community
With over 300 vendors in 50 countries, and Plone being used by
governments and universities all over the world, Plone is truly an
international movement. With a non-profit foundation owning the
trademark and copyrights, Plone is protected and it's
governance is in
good hands. http://plone.org/foundation
The Plone community has an annual conference in a different
city every
year with regional symposia in Europe, N. America and S.
America also
taking place every year. The most recent conference attracted 400
attendees from 30 countries. http://ploneconf2009.org
In additional to the usual issue tracking systems, Plone also
has a
user feedback service to collect suggestions form the users of the
software. these suggestions are reviewed by members of the
core Plone
development team and considered for future versions of Plone.
http://plone.org/news/plone-launches-user-feedback-system
There is also a formal process to get a new feature considered for
inclusion in the Plone core, a paid release manager and a clear
roadmap for what future versions of Plone will bring.
http://plone.org/documentation/manual/plone-developer-reference/overview/release-process
http://dev.plone.org/plone/roadmap
This is still very much in a draft state but I would love any
feedback
on the points, and I plan to write some blog posts about each
point to
go into further details.
thanks,
Nate
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