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Silva is an interesting document oriented CMS which used to boast round-trip MS Word integration via it's Docma Server product. I haven't looked at Silva in a long time, but this reminded me of it. It appears they no longer support Docma server for some reason, but are focusing on integration with OpenOffice instead. Interesting. Looks like Silva has matured a lot over the years, though largely unnoticed.

Silva is an interesting document oriented CMS which used to boast round-trip MS Word integration via it's Docma Server product. I haven't looked at Silva in a long time, but this reminded me of it. It appears they no longer support Docma server for some reason, but are focusing on integration with OpenOffice instead. Interesting. Looks like Silva has matured a lot over the years, though largely unnoticed.

The author should submit the original text with no formatting. The editor and publisher should feed it into a CMS that provides access to multiple versions of the content for copy editors, editors, marketing, IT staffers and the rest. Of the many CMS's available, here are two that handle workflows.

Plone

Silva

Maybe this: DocumentLibrary or CPS Project

Silva supports some interesting features such as (off the top of my head):

• Document versioning
• Role based permissions and workflow
• Possibility of round-trip editing with word (via an add on product)
• Documents stored in XML format
• Easy to use web based WYSIWYG editor support suitable for non-techies
• Publish in multiple formats

It's quite a sweet product which is fairly mature.

No, there have historically been very few security holes with CPS, Plone, Silva, or any of the other Zope-based CMSs out there. In fact, there have been very few security holes with Zope.

All that being said, there are a few sites that have built their own CMS on top of Zope (it has a decent CMF built into it, so it's far from impossible to roll one's own). The two biggest profile ones are probably Boston.com and Saugus.net, but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

There's been an ongoing discussion about this same topic over at Macintouch.

Personally I'm a fan of the Zope / CMF series of content management systems; the built-in CMF is quite powerful and flexible (and actually fairly efficient -- don't be fooled by the slowness of some CMSs built on top).

There are many such systems. There are some in private use (like Boston.com and Saugus.net. There are also some commercial options (like Icoya). Most though are free and open source, like Plone, Infrae Silva, and Nuxeo CPS. Each has its own focus and tends to do certain things better than the others. Each has its own special plug-ins and extensions, but since they all utilize the same underlying base framework, it's usually a doable thing (although typically not trivial) to port a product from one to another.

The capabilities of Zope's built-in CMF are also good enough that it's not at all unreasonable to fashion one's own CMS on top of it if none of the existing products seem to suit one's own particular needs.

You should have a look at the Plone Content Management System[1] and the Railroad Server[2] which complements Plone for (large) digital media files like photography, audio, video and their associated metadata.

There's also a commercial version of Plone, the Enfold Enterprise Server[3], with comes with Windows and ActiveDirectory integration and commercial support.

--
[1] http://www.plone.org/
[2] http://www.infrae.com/products/railroad
[3] http://www.enfoldtechnology.com/

The Plone add-on isn't even necessary. In fact, Silva may make more sense for the problem domain.

I think that Silva on top of Zope may be a bit closer to Xythos than Plone on top of Zope, but I may misunderstand what Xythos does.

Zope is an incredibly flexible web application development environment. It can be used for pretty much anything ranging from a full blown CMS with shopping cart facilities to a cutting edge XHTML/CSS showcase site. It works well with all Internet standards (including XML, XHTML, iCalendar, etc.) and most non-standards / semi-standards (PDF, Flash, RSS, etc.). I've even used it to on-the-fly convert definitions from within a CMS to be served by a dict server.

The popular Plone is built on top of Zope / CMF. Ditto for Silva and Nuxeo CPS.

Because Zope is so flexible, the sites it's used for generally look quite different from one another.

It's really quite a piece of work. In fact it looks like it might be the most comprehensive guide yet written on how to migrate to opensource. This is good stuff.

Yeah, riiiiiiiight.

The first thing I do with any of these 'migration' things is to flip straight to the bit on groupware since that is the single most difficult piece of the puzzle to place; especially document management and scheduling.

What does this paper say? I paraphrase: "Er... well... there's no real option other than web-based groupware although there's Kroupware that we have yet to evaluate."

Really... you could have fooled me!

Then the comments on document management are that the only project they know of is no longer actively maintained.

They really didn't look very hard! (And that's not the only option.)

Really, when I see that they gloss over possibly the most important (read: least known) parts then I'm anything but impressed.