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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Brough, Tom wrote: > > This is a different approach to my previous post regarding PHP Nuke. Here > are the questions we are asking proprietary CMS suppliers to answer. Note > that some of the questions are tagged as Essential, others are Desirable. I > have had a go at answering section one. Note that these could be applied to > any opensource CMS, but currently only PHPNuke is on the list. - From my brief > research work it looks like questions 1.11 (Compliance with Standards) may > be a sticking point. Excuse the bad cut and paste job, and please note I > didn't set the questions so no flames please. However constructive comments > are welcome. I personally have worked through section one doing some > research but I am opening this up to the community. As a previous pre-sales engineer I was called upon to generate buzzwords for responses to these things many a time. I'm not about to do it unpaid, but I'd like to comment. (Oh and most sales people would rather sacrifice their first born son <well maybe I exagerrate a little> than put a straight "no" as it would give you an "excuse" to drop their bid.) > 1. General > 1.1. Platform Independent > Essential > Server side: Must be able to run on at least two of the following: Windows > NT/2000, Linux/Unix, > AS/400 (can be specific to the platform) This probably isn't a problem for anything targeting POSIX. Although I think there is a place for strategic planning, what platform would you prefer. Did I read that Unilver are moving everything server side to Linux if they can. Indeed there may be a strategic case for moving everything to MS, if you can justify the savings elsewhere, and can get adequate guarantees from them (probably not applicable to small projects or companies). The usual reason for platform independance was to avoid dependence on one vendor. This was less of an issue with Open Systems as vendors would often support several Unix flavours, however the move to Linux means you can get hardware, OS and OS support from HP/Compaq, IBM, and others with just one OS. Of course you might be afraid of Linus steering Linux a route with lots of incompatible upgrades, but a lot of people won't follow. There is life in 2.2 kernels yet (well a little). > 1.2. Database independent > Essential > Must be able to run on at least two of the following: MS SQL, Oracle. > Postgres and mySQL Similar comments apply to some free databases, do you want independance of vendor, do you really want a choice of database (seems unlikely), or do you just want to exclude small companies who haven't ported their product to lots of platforms yet? One of the products I sold in a previous life ran on MS SQL, DB2, Oracle, however at both sales and consultation stages the authors said "go Oracle it has less issues" (especially on NT). Indeed the product design was compromised in places by being made to work with MS-SQL which at the time just didn't scale as well in terms of complex queries. So you may find a product that is designed and built to one database works better. Usually "porting" knocks the rough edges off software products, but it can also force compromise.... oh what a tricky path. > 1.3. Back office integration independence > Essential > Will work with Java and/or .NET frameworks. Either - does that mean your building a framework based on this one decision... > 1.4. Internal staff not required to log on! (Picks up network ID > automatically) Desirable No problem for as long as your using standard Kerberos one time keys - right? Or NIS perhaps? Or some DCE based system? Or do you mean must integrate with Microsoft Domain login, or Microsoft's bastardised Kerberos? Most of these are no problem for any platform, but many vendors may not even know how to integrate these things. > 1.11. Compliance with Standards > Essential > E-gif, RNIB, E-GMF, W3C, Bobby, SOCITM As Theo observed some of these are standards bodies, and the RNIB doesn't to my knowlege dictate any major standards, but they do hand out awards for accessible content. As for e-GIF I shall try to contain my cynicism of such efforts, but last time I asked the interoperability guidelines for web sites were only available as an MS Word document.... And I was told in all seriousness that the guidelines don't apply to non-web content, which I'm sure from a purely technical perspective they don't. e-GIF seems to have migrated from a clueless attempt to standardise, to a clueless list of standards.... So does that e-mail integration above have to use S/MIME v3? Or only S/MIME v3 if it is encrypted, unencrypted is presumably fine. > 2.2. Handles other electronic records and documents > Essential > As a minimum the ability to interface with other electronic records and > documents at some future date. Huh? > 3. Web content Management > 3.1. Stored as "flat" files > Essential Huh? You want it in the database and in flatfiles. > Three Issues: > * Speed - Need assurances that H/W and database can perform if this is only > offered option. I predict no one will say their product won't scale, even if the first time you fire it up for testing they admit your the largest install that they have ever done, and the database dies with everything deadlocked.... Bitter me - I think experienced is appropriate - it was when the import tool crashed with a new error importing the 376,000th order record that I first got nervous...... Two weeks later I was a lot more mellow about it's failure to scale... > * The ability of external spiders to reference and catalogue our pages, > which is not always possible with database driven sites. - Google overcomes > this problem. Not sure about others. Surely that is a spider problem if the pages are presented according to a relevant standard. > * Need meaningful URL's without needing to have redirection statements to > obscure database related page requests. I'd settle for bookmarkable where appropriate. Meaningful is a bit vague. > 4.3. Integrates with Word/other potential "content generation s/w" > Essential > Capable of importing other document/content formats. Hmm so we can present content in formats that aren't standard conforming, and we expect your software to take it from undocumented proprietary formats and convert it into a standard conforming ones. Do you expect it to "do what you mean" at the same time ;-) Sure various systems can probably make a stab at this, but if you don't want the pain of too many translation issues you need to adopt similar standards throughout your IT systems. I save HTML from my Word processor fir interchange - it isn't very good HTML, but at least I know the "'"s with stay "'"s, and the character set exists on target systems. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQE+XlgmGFXfHI9FVgYRAmIpAJ9IahAisjp68d4IbzoLNPrXNBpjYgCfchtD blMbJAlp8QUvqLifkTyRc2c= =Fv3w -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.