Re: Questions regarding Silva for presentation

Hi Roman,

> I'm preparing a presentation about Silva for the upcoming  =

> KiwiPycon.  A
> few questions have been raised, which I can't really answer.  I hope  =

> to
> have more luck here :)
>
>    How does Silva rate against so-called
>    'enterprise-level' document management systems such as Alfresco?

The answer is an apples and oranges situation. Alfresco is really  =

built for document management. It can also serve web sites. Silva was  =

built for content management. It can also store documents.

However we don't recommend Silva (actually, the limitations are in  =

Zope) for storing *large* numbers of documents. At least not out of  =

the box. Various add-ons help to alleviate the storage problems, and  =

the recent arrival of blob storage in Zope has made document storage  =

more attractive.

A number of years ago Infrae wrote a Document Library application,  =

which *is* a DMS, and integrates seamlessly with a Silva website using  =

the OAI protocol:
http://infrae.com/products/documentlibrary

>    How do large organisations make use of Silva? (I do remember
>    installations at the ETH Z=FCrich and the University of Rotterdam,  =

> but
>    I'm not sure how extensive they were, or how far customised they  =

> are
>    compared to the standard distribution.)

The organizations have taken varying approaches. ETH has a large  =

installation with some 450 websites running in one Silva (each site  =

has a separate url). ETH has in-house developers.

Most large organizations operate a ZEO cluster, sometimes with  =

separation of concerns (such as editing or special instances for bot  =

visits). All large organizations use caching, most often Squid.

All the orgs have customized skins. Most have custom content types,  =

usually an extensions that integrates with an external data source,  =

such as a course or user database. But some, like University College  =

London, have also extended core content types like Silva News Network  =

and made those available.

HTH, if you need more details let us know,

Kit

-- =

Kit BLAKE =B7 Infrae =B7 http://infrae.com/ + 31 10 243 7051