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Plone Live Blog
Share your Enterprise Plone deployment story… and Win an iPod
Do you have compelling Plone implementation information to share? Great! Tell us your story and we will select the panelists from these entries. You may also qualify to win an iPod (winner to be announced after the panel discussion).
You
could be invited to participate in the panel discussion during the
fourth annual Plone Conference which will be held October 25-27 in
Why are we doing this?
This is an effort at sharing the leading enterprise Plone deployment stories with the community. We expect this to increase the adoption of Plone in the enterprise. And
we genuinely want only the very best Plone implementations – large
enterprises, complex deployments and compelling statistics.
What is in it for you?
- You could be short listed to participate in a Panel discussion “Plone and Large Enterprises” at the Plone conference
- You could win an iPod
- The Top-5 implementation stories will be shared at the Plone Conference
iPod Winner
Winner
will be announced at the end of the Panel discussion and if you are not
present to receive it in person, we will contact you by email.
Privacy Policy
Any information shared is for sole use at the Plone Conference, on Plone.org, and on Plone.net websites.
Deadlines
Submission – September 22, 2006
Announce Panelists’ selection – September 25, 2006
Sponsored by CIGNEX
CIGNEX (http://www.cignex.com) is the Platinum sponsor for the Plone Conference 2006.
Just fill out the following form describing your Plone solution and email it to munwar@cignex.com with a subject: Plone and
Plone and Large
Project Description (website URL and Business Problem solved with Plone)
- 5 to 10 lines
Tell us more details about your Site Statistics?
- Page Views / month:
- Unique Visitors / month:
- Registered users:
- Number of Content Types:
- Number of Workflows:
- Number of documents or Database size:
Contact Information
- First Name/ Last Name:
- Title:
- Company:
- Phone:
- Email:
Additional Information:
- Any information which you feel relevant to share such as integration with external systems.
I started blogging in our corporate blog site openlogue. Openlogue site will have open conversations about open source, open standards and open methodologies. Openlogue has interesting series such as "Open Source Best Practises". You can find more details at http://openlogue.com/blog/?cat=7
It's been more than a year since we launched Plonelive (this) website. I would like to maintain this website to provide news and announcements related to Plonelive book. This site is an official website for Plonelive book.
Please do visit Openlogue website regularly to discuss about opensource related topics.
Once again thanks for your support and interest in Plonelive book.
Plone 2.5 is a release with a significant focus on improved infrastructure. This is the first release of Plone that utilizes Zope 3 technologies. The CacheFu project now ships with Plone, depending on the setup leads to between 10x to 40x faster page loads and makes caching transparent to the end-user.
CacheFu is designed to work with the squid proxy cache. There has been a great deal of interest in CacheFu. Many people (including me) requested Geoff Davis during Plone Symposium (New Orleans) to package it with Plone so that we could use it in Production deployments. Cachefu is now in Beta Release.
A crash-course in CacheFu, squid, http acceleration, and a ton of useful links is available on plone.org site. Use CacheFu to make your site fly.
I would recommend everybody to go through Geoff Davis's presentation at Plone Symposium titled "Make Plone Go Fast". It is a 88 page comprehensive material (thanks to Geoff). Here is the link to the material:
http://plone.org/events/regional/nola06/collateral/make-plone-go-fast.pdf
Go ahead test Plone 2.5 beta and provide your valuable feedback to the developers.
During the key note speech by Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan at Plone Symposium, the following interesting Statistics were mentioned:
- Plone supports 50 translations out of the box
- There are about 300+ add-on products available for Plone
- In 2005, the Plone direct downloads were 250,000+
The biggest strength of Plone is the way it handles migrations. Most of the commercial content management companies make money from migration projects. With Plone, customers get the migration for free. Alaxendar Limi mentioned that a huge effort is required to provide "in place" migration for the content (which is the process as of today). In future, the strategy for migration will be different. The content (hierarchy, security, data, rules, content relationships etc) from the old Plone site will be extracted (exported) out to an external storage (may be a combination of XML files and binary files). Users will then create a new Plone site (latest one) and dump (import) all the data back. This strategy seems to be less painful and more efficient.
Right now, Plone development team receives very little feedback. Limi requested all the Plone users to provide valuable feedback to Plone development team.
There were interesting comments about the Plone future roadmap. Plone 2.5 release focuses on infrastructural changes and Plone 3.0 focuses on User Interface. Some one asked if Plone 3.0 is going to run on Zope 3.0. The answer is no. Plone 3.0 runs on Zope 2 technologies (mostly Zope 2.9). During dinner time, we had various conversations about Plone running on Zope 3.0 technologies etc. I liked Alan's comments: "You stick with Plone and we will take you to Zope 3.0 whenever it is appropriate".
Overall the conference is very well received. All the talks (including the case studies) were good. I uploaded some of the photographs at:
http://www.plonelive.com/albums/psym2006/view
The Plone Symposiums and Plone Conferences are focused to provide information to "Plone Developers". I strongly believe that we must attract more customers to participate in these events and conferences. One way of attracting end customers is to have "domain specific" tracks such as "Plone in Education", "Plone in Government" and "Plone in Media" etc. What do you suggest?
The latest release covers the following new features:
* LiveSearch for faster instant searches
* Smart Folders to automatically organizing the content
* Powerful Visual Editing
* Flexible Navigation and Sitemaps
* Full Screen Mode
* Improved Default Content Types
* Internationalization and Multilingual Support
Read more details at:
http://www.sourcebeat.com/TitleAction.do?id=11
If you have not subscribed to sourcebeat for Plonelive book yet, I would recommend you to read the sample chapter at:
http://www.sourcebeat.com/docs/Plone%20Live/Rev_8/Plone%20Live_SampleChapter.pdf
Banyan is a web based collaborative information management system implemented using PLONE.
Banyan Application areas:
- Strategic Planning
- Risk Management
- Systems engineering
- Compliance Management
- Document Management
You can find more details about Banyan at http://www.banyantrees.org website. Thanks to Bob Barter of LLNL who spent numerous hours working on Banyan project and making it open source. Banyan has been released as open source under the GNU General Public License. I (as a part of CIGNEX team) is fortunate enough to work on such strategic and challenging project.
Banyan is hosted at sourceforge ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/banyanims ). There is an extensive documentation (> 13 MB) and a cool Windows Installer available to download. You should check it out.
I am presenting Banyan Case Study during Plone Symposium (March 10th in New Orleans). Check out the schedule at http://http://plone.org/events/regional/nola06/talks
Plone developer community is always active. The next release will have some major improvements to Plone (http://plone.org/products/plone/releases/2.5)
Plone supports a configurable workflow called "DC Workflow". The problem with the existing Plone frame work is that you need to link a content type with a specific workflow. For example a "document" type can be linked to "document_review" workflow process. Documents residing in various workspaces will always go through the same workflow process. You cannot have workflow based on a workspace (Well! we can always program the DC workflow to handle the workspace) out of the box. One important feature in Plone 2.5 is going to be "Placeful workflow support for Plone". Read more details at: http://plone.org/products/plone/roadmap/52
Other nice features include PlonePAS, Zope3 Views etc. I am glad the Goldegg project (which was sponsored by CIGNEX) helped create most of the nice features for Plone 2.5.
Individuals and companies using Plone should consider funding such initiatives to make Plone a better place.
Thanks to Alexander Limi, Hanno Schlichting, Rob Miller, Whit Morriss, Sidnei da Silva, Alan Runyan, Cameron Cooper, Maik Röder, Encolpe Degoute for working on PLIPs. Thanks to Paul, CIGNEX for making this happen through Goldegg and big thanks to Alec Mitchell (Release Manager).
Good show guys.
The Prince and the Golden Egg
A Tale of Open Source Project Fund-Raising
By Raven Zachary
Digital Edition available @ www.eosj.com
Click here to download the article
The recent SDForum event
http://www.sdforum.org/SDForum/Templates/CalendarEvent.aspx?CID=1818&mo=1&yr=2006
Focused on Python Language was very informative. Speakers include Guido van Rossum, Alex Martelli, Munwar Shariff, David Marks, Peter Yared, Braham Cohen, and Greg Stein
I was on the panel with Alex Martelli (Technical Lead, Google and Author of Python in a Nutshell) to discuss an interesting topic - "Usage of Python in Enterprise". We were only two people on the panel. Initially I thought we would not be able to answer all the questions. As you all are aware Alex Martelli is very knowledgeable person. He provided technical details and business usage of Python.
Moderator Alexa (Alexandra Weber Morales) started the session with interesting observations. From salary statistics it is known that the average salary of a Python developer is $90K per annum which is $10K more than salary of the programmers who use other programming languages.
Alex Martelli replied that "the productivity of a python developer is about 40% higher than others. Hence it is natural to get 10% out of the profit as salary".
Which is quite true. Our developers use ArchGenXML which is a code-generator for CMF/Plone applications (Products) based on the Archetypes framework. It parses UML models in XMI-Format (.xmi, .zargo, .zuml), created with applications such as ArgoUML, Poseidon or ObjectDomain. These kinds of tools improve productivity.
Similarly Functional Tests, documentation generators, debuggers, logging tools, "LARGE COMMUNITY SUPPORT", readily available packages improve productivity. I read somewhere that "Program development using Python is 5-10 times faster than using C/C++, and 3-5 times faster than using Java."
One of the great advantages about python is that developers can use their choice of Operating System (Ubuntu, Windows) for development and they can deploy the application on any target operating system such as Linux, Solaris etc without changing code. This will give flexibility and a choice of IDE for the developers.
Some one was looking for a framework based on python which would help him to serve his web application. I introduced Plone to him and everybody noted down the URL of plone.org website.
Another interesting discussion was on security. Alex gave examples of security issues with various frameworks and suggested to use Python behind a secure framework. I informed about the Plone (python) implementations at DoD, NASA, Navy etc for secure and mission critical applications. Where python runs behind a secure web server and secure application server.
Another question - "How should an enterprise make a decision regarding which language to use? Is it just a niche marketing angle? Should language flexibility trump evangelism or convenience/opportunity trump ubiquity?"
It is very difficult to answer this question. Some enterprises do not make any decision about the language. They do make decisions about the packages/applications they use in the enterprise (for example SAP, IBM Web sphere etc). In such cases, the languages are enforced by vendors and there is no choice. If you are a services company then also you will not have much choice. If you are Products Company then choosing language makes sense with respect to interoperability, cost of code maintenance etc.
There were many interesting topics discussed during 50 minutes session.
I look forward to attend such sessions in future.
Open Source in the Enterprise brings together leading industry practitioners from every stage of Open Source implementation. Sessions will highlight companies who are in the early phases of evaluation and adoption, and proceed through to those who are more mature with regards to their Open Source strategies and who are rapidly moving towards actual business application…
Event speakers are from companies such as SUN Microsystems, IBM, Yahoo, RedHat, Advantest, Travelocity and CIGNEX.
CIGNEX is conducting a 3 hour workshop on "Open Source Business Applications", which includes the demonstration of the following four business applications built using Plone.
- Media Portal
- Compliance Management System
- Banyan - Requirements Manager for Systems Engineering
- Channel Management Portal
Through this conference, CIGNEX will introduce the capabilities of Plone to the CIOs, CTOs of the corporate world.
Read more details at:
http://www.marcusevans.com/events/CFEventinfo.asp?EventID=10123
