Plone in Enterprisesspeaker : Jean-Paul Ladagedate : October 10th 2007at : Plone Conference

Introduction

• Jean-Paul Ladage

• Chairman of Stichting Zope Plone

• Plone Foundation Member

• ZEA Partners Member

• Sales and Technical Director Zest Software

Google Appliance

Micro formats

Navigation Page

Content Publishing

Multiple locations

Link of the day

World wide intranet

Single Sign-on

Atom feeds

Research GroupsQuote of the day

Link Monitoring

Phonebook

Migration support

Scalability

Feedfeeder

AZ links

Philips Research

• Philips Research as part of Koninklijke Philips N.V. has expanded the scale and scope of its activities to become one of the world's major private research organizations

• Creating technologies that will lead to products for improving people's lives

• From electrical engineering and physics to chemistry, mathematics, mechanics, information technology and software

Challenges

• How do you keep employees informed instead of overwhelmed with information?

• What are acceptable levels of defects?

• Will performance be an issue?

• How do you manage the project?

Scalability

• LDAP authentication against an Active Directory containing over almost 200.000 users

• Single Sign-on using Apache mod_ntlm and apachepas

• Over 1300 logged in users daily

• Fine tuned CacheFu using Role based cache keys

LDAP

• ldapconfig simplifies the configuration of LDAPUserFolder and LDAPMultiplugins for PlonePAS

• ldapconfig comes with a ldapconfig.py.example which is well documented

• PloneLDAP provides the necessary patches to LDAPMultiplugins to get user and group management features.

• copy it to $INSTANCE_HOME/etc/ldapconfig.py

• plone.org/products/ldapconfig

Apachepas

• Apache authentication modules like mod_ntlm inject an special header upon successful authentication.

• A PAS plugin that reads the authentication header from the request and assigns a role based on group membership

• plone.org/products/apachepas

Home Page

• Composite Pack to manage page layout

• Custom Viewlets

• Generic Setup Profile for configuration

• For 3.0 support take a look at Collage

• Location Selector

Multiple Locations

• Aachen

• Bangalore

• Briarcliff

• Eindhoven

• Hamburg

• Redhill

• Shanghai

• pluggablecatalog

• locationmonkey

ProductsBecause Philips Research is based in 7 locations world wide and the largevolumes of information being published, we designed a concept called LocationAwareness. This allows site managers to provide one or more target locationsfor each piece of content. The end user can select his preferred location andtherefor hide content that is not relevant for his location.

Pluggable Catalog

• plone.org/products/pluggablecatalog (not released yet)

• Provides IQueryDefaults

• Define a function that provides the logic

• Make the catalog smarter

• interface.directlyProvides(locationDefaults,IQueryDefaults)

• saves us customizing a lot of catalog queries in templates and browser views

Performance

• Caching 24 versions of the home page

• Dealing with large numbers of logged in users

• Drop personalization

• Cache based on Roles + Location

Feedfeeder

• Import of Atom feeds used for news items

• Fully searchable in Plone

• Location Aware like all other content

Colloquia

<div> <dl> <dt>date<dt><dd>2006-11-23</dd> <dt>permission<dt><dd>philips</dd> </dl></div>

• An adapter for feedfeeder items

• A Microformat is put at the top of the <content> tag of each Atom entry.

• It reads this structure and uses the values for saving the feed item in Plone

• ‘date’ will fill the date at which the Colloquium is planned

• ‘permission’ allows us to differentiate between workflow states.

Message of the day

• Message of the day

• Link of the day

• Quote of the day

• Rotation script (daily cron job)

• Why? Because it’s Fun!

Google Search

• Research Google Appliance integration

• Authenticated searches

AZ Links

• Search index of links to all intranet websites

• Search by keyword or A-Z index

• Easy editing for managers

Migration support

• 40+ Research groups

• 12+ Service departments

• MS FrontPage website using DOM manipulating javascript as the main template

The Philips Research intranet consisted of over 60 individually managedFrontPage based websites. By providing a gradual migration path each site canstart migrating content in Plone, while the main navigation points to theexisting website. After the content is migrated, changing the main navigationto Plone is managed with a single checkbox for each subsite.

Migration support (2)

• Main navigation links to external websites for visitors

• Home button of each external website links back to Plone

• Main navigation links to a migratable folder inside Plone for managers

• Migrate folder by clicking a checkbox

Migration support (3)

Project management

• Extreme Management to support us

• Good at managing complexity by breaking down stories into tasks.

• Iteration meetings allow the customer to provide feedback early and change course at regular intervals

• Standup meetings help the team to communicate daily progress and ask for help

• Reporting is pretty much non-existing

• Join the Extreme Management sprint on saturday

Conclusions

• Philips Research acknowledges that Plone is a valuable solution and will continue to invest in their intranet.

• Embrace Open Source for their Services

• Release products to the community

Questions?Thank you for your attention

j.ladage@zestsoftware.nlhttp://zestsoftware.nl