Plone is an excellent out of the box collaboration solution with rock-solid security track record. Learn how you can set up your own Plone [Intranet] in a Box™ in just a few minutes on any cloud provider and run it for as many users as you need, for only a few dollars per month. https://2020.ploneconf.org/talks/your-plone-intranet-in-a-boxtm/view

1. YOUR
PLONE [INTRANET]
IN A BOX™
Kim Nguyen / kim@sixfeetup.com
1

2. ABOUT ME
➤ Director of Engineering @ Six Feet Up
➤ Plonista since 2003
➤ 350+ Plone sites at University of Wisconsin Oshkosh,
including the campus Intranet
➤ Plone Foundation Board (2014-2019), Plone Conference
organizer (2016, 2017), Plone Symposium Midwest organizer
(2013, 2014)
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3. PLONE
Secure, Flexible
Content Management In A Box
3

4. PLONE 6
Volto: React-based Front End
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5. 5

6. 6

7. PLONE AND INTRANETS
➤ Plone’s silent but huge use case:
➤ governments (Brazil, Belgium)
➤ universities
➤ corporations (Star Alliance, Porsche)
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8. WHAT IS AN INTRANET
➤ Access management
➤ Collaboration between teams and individuals
➤ Document-centric (pages, PDFs)
➤ Highly organized (folder structures)
➤ Search
➤ Forms, forms data
➤ Dashboards, customizability
8

9. PLONE IN A BOX™
➤ An easy way to deploy a new Plone server
➤ Takes 2–15 minutes
➤ Choose from 2 cloud providers (3rd coming soon)
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10. PLONE IN A BOX™ ON LINODE
➤ Linode is used by the Plone Foundation
➤ Inexpensive: $5/month and up
➤ Ready in under 15 minutes
➤ Create an account at https://linode.com
➤ Create a new virtual machine, using the Community
StackScript named “Plone In A Box”
➤ Follow the step-by-step instructions at https://github.com/
tkimnguyen/plone-in-a-box
10

11. PLONE IN A BOX™ ON AMAZON AWS
➤ Largest, most established, feature-rich cloud provider
➤ $15/month and up
➤ Ready in ~3 minutes
➤ Create a free AWS account at https://aws.amazon.com/
➤ Create a new virtual machine, using the Amazon machine
image (AMI) named “Plone In A Box”
➤ Follow the step-by-step instructions at https://github.com/
tkimnguyen/plone-in-a-box
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12. PLONE IN A BOX™ ON DIGITALOCEAN
➤ Inexpensive: $5/month and up
➤ Known for its App Marketplace
➤ Coming soon
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13. LET'S USE AMAZON AWS
➤ …because it’s the quickest to set up!
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14. 14

15. WHAT’S INSIDE PLONE IN A BOX™?
➤ Some well-known add-ons:
➤ collective.documentviewer (for PDFs, other doc formats)
➤ collective.easyform (editable forms)
➤ pas.plugins.ldap (Active Directory)
➤ plone.app.mosaic (tile-based layouts)
➤ collective.lineage (create subsites)
➤ Plone starts at boot time
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16. PLONE IN A BOX™ IS FOR TEST DRIVING
➤ Plone in a Box™ is not locked down
➤ Does not send out email
➤ Steps to secure minimally:
➤ Change the admin password!
➤ Add a
fi
rewall
➤ Disable root login, password logins
➤ Install an SSL certi
fi
cate, require secure HTTPS browsing
➤ Ask a Plone provider; see plone.com
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17. PLONE’S ACCESS MANAGEMENT
➤ Plone’s powerful security model
➤ Users and groups
➤ Permissions and roles
➤ Large scale access management (Active Directory, LDAP)
➤ Work
fl
ow is a core feature
➤ Compare to other CMSs
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18. 18

19. “A watched pot never boils
-Johnny Appleseed
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20. PLONE CONTENT TYPES
➤ Pages
➤ Files (PDFs, Word, Excel, etc.)
➤ Images, photos
➤ News items
➤ Calendar events
➤ Collections (reusable queries)
➤ Create custom content types, e.g. meeting agendas, using just
your web browser or in code
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21. ORGANIZATION OF CONTENT
➤ Folders
➤ Nested folders
➤ Per-folder security
21

22. PLONE WORKFLOW
➤ Work
fl
ow = states + transitions
➤ E.g., create a page, submit it for review, then publish
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23. 23

24. PLONE WORKFLOW
➤ A content item has a state
➤ Every state de
fi
nes who can do what to the content item
➤ There are transitions between states
➤ Every transition de
fi
nes who can execute it and under what
condition(s)
➤ Security is applied consistently per-item, per-state, per-transition
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25. SEVERAL INCLUDED WORKFLOWS
➤ Simple Publication Work
fl
ow:
➤ private → pending → published
➤ Intranet/Extranet Work
fl
ow
➤ private → internal → pending → internally published →
external
➤ …and others
➤ You can create custom work
fl
ows
25

26. APPLYING WORKFLOW
➤ Each Plone site has a default work
fl
ow
➤ Each content type can have its own work
fl
ow
➤ A folder can have its own work
fl
ow (“Placeful Work
fl
ow”)
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27. EXAMPLE FOLDER STRUCTURE
➤ “Public”
➤ “Services”
➤ “About”
➤ “Intranet”
➤ “Teams”
➤ “Team1”, “Team2”
➤ “Clients”
➤ “Client1”
➤ “Client2”
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28. COLLABORATION BETWEEN TEAMS AND INDIVIDUALS
➤ Create workspaces (folders or nested folder structures) for
teams
➤ Use either:
➤ the Sharing view to grant add/edit/view/review for a team
➤ Placeful Work
fl
ow to set a per-folder work
fl
ow policy
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29. TURN AN ENTIRE SITE INTO AN INTRANET
➤ Change the site’s default work
fl
ow to Intranet/Extranet
Work
fl
ow
➤ Or create a hybrid: mix publicly-visible with private content
(requires login)
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30. BUILT-IN SEARCH
➤ Plone’s search is security-aware
➤ Searches all content items by title, description, keywords, rich
text body
➤ You can include custom content type
fi
elds in search
➤ Scale up with Solr, Elasticsearch to search millions of items
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31. FORMS
➤ Editable forms
➤ Exportable data (CSV)
➤ Custom actions (send email, create content, initiate
work
fl
ow)
➤ Example: conference registration form (see “Building a
Multiconference Solution on Plone 5.2” by Janine Donnelly,
Annette Lewis)
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32. WORKFLOW APPLICATIONS
➤ Forms + work
fl
ow = a very powerful use of Plone
➤ Create custom content types & forms, apply a custom
work
fl
ow
➤ Replaces old, slow paper-based processes
➤ O
ffi
ce of International Education at University of Wisconsin
Oshkosh has saved 0.5 FTE/year since 2008
➤ See training.plone.org/5/ttw/work
fl
ow.html
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33. 33

34. “Nerding alert!
-Johnny Appleseed
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35. MAKING PLONE ENTERPRISE-READY
➤ Use a more scalable ZEO deployment of Plone
➤ Add a web server and HTTPS/SSL
➤ Add caching, in Plone, varnish, Cloud
fl
are/Cloudfront CDN
➤ Add Plone backups, system-level backups, log rotation,
monitoring
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36. MAKING PLONE ENTERPRISE-READY
➤ Consider using a large-scale database: RelStorage &
PostgreSQL or Amazon RDS
➤ Connect to centralized authentication (LDAP, ActiveDirectory,
OAuth)
➤ Add Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for bulk
fi
le storage
➤ Deploy Plone ZEO clients using autoscaling containers
(Docker)
➤ See “Running Plone on AWS” by Calvin Hendryx-Parker
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37. EXAMPLE AWS ARCHITECTURE
37

38. IN SUMMARY…
➤ Plone in a Box™ lets you get a running Plone site in minutes
➤ Plone makes a ready-to-go intranet
➤ Plone can scale for large organizations
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39. NEXT STEPS
➤ Learn more (plone.com, plone.org)
➤ See the documentation(docs.plone.org)
➤ Get self-paced Plone training (training.plone.org)
➤ Join the Plone forum (community.plone.org)
➤ Let us know how you’d like to use Plone! (sixfeetup.com)
➤ See quaive.com for a Plone-based “social intranet” solution
(open source version at ploneintranet.org,
docs.ploneintranet.org)
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40. Planning Development Orchestration Support
QUESTIONS? PLEASE ASK ME
!
KIM@SIXFEETUP.COM
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