why the new zealand government and others choose plone
Post on 21-Oct-2014
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A presentation for World Plone Day 2008 in Auckland, New Zealand that discusses some of the reasons that Plone should be considered for CMS deployments, and a small case-study of the Plone deployment at the New Zealand Ministry of Economic DevelopmentTRANSCRIPT
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Why Plone? Cost
Endorsed by the State Services Commission
Freedom to develop and customise
Strong codebase
Integration with existing systems
Multilingual and Accessible
Proven in Government and business
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Cost No acquisition costs
No ongoing licencing fees
Status protected by the Plone Foundation
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Endorsed by the State Services Commission “The Content Management System, Plone, is a particularly powerful tool for managing websites”
“Plone met all those criteria [...] and is a very cost effective solution"
Laurence Millar, Deputy Commissioner for Information and Communications Technology at SSC
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Freedom to Develop and Customise GPL – source code will always be available (the same licence that Linux uses)
Copyright protected by the Plone Foundation
Large documentation ecosystem:
plone.org/documentation
api.plone.org
Seven published books covering user documentation to site customisation
ploneusers mailing list
online help channel: #plone on irc.freenode.net
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Strong Codebase Open Source
Built on Python
Excellent security track record:
33,000 CVE entries
only 9 recorded mentioning 'Plone'
only 3 of those are 'High'
Excellent automated test coverage
For example, there are approximately 17,000 lines of code in part of Plone's core libraries of which about 14,000 are covered with automatic test routines
Even the CIA uses Plone (www.cia.gov)
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Integration with Existing Systems Windows Active Directory
LDAP
Lots of webservices APIs – standard Python libraries for:
XMLRPC
Soap
JSON
SQLAlchemy for Oracle/MySQL/MS SQL Server...
Salesforce.com integration available
Run Plone in virtually any environment
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Multilingual and Accessible Translated into over 35 languages
Translate pages into multiple languages with LinguaPlone
Extensive effort invested in meeting W3 standards, WCAG, and Section 508 for maximum compatibility and accessibility
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Proven in Government and Business Many New Zealand Government sites using Plone currently:
www.e.govt.nz www.mwa.govt.nz www.treasury.govt.nz www.electricitycommission.govt.nz www.companies.govt.nz www.ppsr.govt.nz www.crownminerals.govt.nz www.rsm.govt.nz www.societies.govt.nz www.insolvency.govt.nz www.iponz.govt.nz www.oag.govt.nz www.auditnz.govt.nz www.courtsofnz.govt.nz www.natlib.govt.nz
Many worldwide Governments, Councils, and Agencies using Plone:
177 Government sites listed at:http://plone.net/sites/sites_listing?industries%3Alist=Government&countries%3Alist=
...And a further 244 NonProfit sites listed at:http://plone.net/sites/sites_listing?industries%3Alist=Nonprofits&countries%3Alist=
Many businesses worldwide running their public website with Plone (see http://plone.net for more indicative numbers)
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Plone in the Ministry of Economic Development Integration with existing websites and systems
Separate Internal from Public
True HA for the Public sites
Aggressive website caching for optimal performance
Visitor numbers – Plone is an Enterprise system
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Integration with Existing Websites and Systems Many challenges with existing bespoke registry sites running on a variety of platforms:
Oracle PL/SQL
Tomcat
J2EE Weblogic
Needed to support business continuity – no extended outage period while CMS was implemented could be contemplated
Needed to seamlessly wrap and complement existing site functionality, not replace
Needed to satisfy both internal business users and diverse external users
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Several approaches used depending on situation and appropriateness
'Wrapped' functionality – CMS presents existing site functionality with IFRAME (www.companies.govt.nz)
'Cooperative' functionality – CMS generates special custom templates that are consumed by J2EE/Weblogic and integrated into generated pages before being delivered to the client (www.insolvency.govt.nz)
'Collaborative' functionality – CMS hosts links to external site ala 'internet banking model' (www.crownminerals.govt.nz)
All approaches were feasible and easily achieved with Plone – it fit the environment, instead of forcing the environment to fit itself
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Separate Internal from Public Create/Modify/Edit/Rework/Withdraw/Delete content independent of Public view
Enforce content review policies, regular audit intervals, content versioning, hyperlink coherency etc without disturbing the Public site
Review a 'Preview site' before deciding to make it Public
Enforce policy on what it means for an item to be 'ready for Public consumption' with a high degree of confidence – only items past certain review states ever touch the Public site
Easy separation of content Caching policies for Public versus Internal, to allow aggressive caching of the Public site and very fast site response
EnSimpleStaging to enable content deployment based on policy to the 'Preview site' (3rdparty Product)
BSBDeployTool to enable transition of Preview site to Public and integration with Caching Policy framework (bespoke Product)
Deploy and update the Public content at any time of day
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True HA for the Public Sites Plone's licencing and architecture has allowed us to develop a true High Availability solution for the
Public websites, with no Single Point Of Failure (SPOF)
Meets the needs of onlineonly Government services such as the Personal Property Securities Register, which must meet certain legislated criteria concerning its public availability
Four independent Plone instances power the Public site, at least two are always running
Enabled by the BSBDeployTool and a fully Open Source software stack:
Linux Virtual Server (load balancer)
Apache (client web server)
Varnish (website caching tool)
Pound (application server load balancer)
Zope (application server for Plone)
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Benefits Continuous service availability for the last 27 months (since golive)
CMS is available even during scheduled weekly service outages for the Transactional systems:
Customers can be kept updated of the progress of the service outage
CMS software is updated live
Only external factors have disrupted customer access to the site (eg, ISP goes down)
Environment has migrated across hardware platforms twice in this period with no customervisible disruption
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Aggressive Website Caching for Optimal Performance
Varnish (www.varnishcache.org)
Having separate Public site allows very aggressive caching rules – only generate a page once
Caching rules tracked and managed by BSBCacheManager (bespoke Product) – more traditional Plone sites have the CacheFu Product (standard with Plone 3)
How fast? For a complete page view with all associated resources...
www.google.co.nz – 229ms
www.trademe.co.nz – 326ms
www.companies.govt.nz – 274ms
Plone on its own generates pages ready for delivery at around 400ms – still very fast if the site is scaled and sized appropriately for expected load
Caching only added this year as a 'nice to have' – prior to that all website requests were serviced directly by Plone
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Visitor Numbers – Plone is an Enterprise System
www.companies.govt.nz one of the busiest New Zealand government sites:
Many transactional functions
Daily business processing occuring with company registrations, annual return filing, etc.
October 2008 – pretty average month for 2008, all transactions for the entire site:
114,000 unique visitors across the whole month
22,000,000 pages for the month
52,000,000 hits for the month
408GB of bandwidth consumed for the month
about 2,000,000 hits per business day during business hours
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How Much of that was Plone? 145,000 pages viewed per business day during business hours (not mere 'hits')
3,200,000 pages viewed across the entire month
plus another 125,000 website text searches
Four pages every second from Plone were being requested by someone in New Zealand, every business day for the month of October
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Growth From initial site (Companies) two years ago to 8 today
More sites planned to golive before the end of the year
Plus a major intranet site used for the Contact Centre
recently won TUANZ award for information architecture
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Make Plone Work for You Anyone can install with the Unified Installer and very little advance knowledge
Low barrier to entry with customisation:
Basic theming tools can give way when necessary to more complex development.
Plone architecture means projects can be small and build on one another
Massive 3rdparty plugin library already
FMIT is ready to help when you're ready!
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Questions
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