A public document repository for CSIRO ICT Centre
More than 200 CSIRO researchers needed to publish reports and papers on the web without going through one web editor. We built them a repository on Plone and ran it for them.
The problem
Reports come from many people at once, and most of those people are researchers, not web editors. If every document has to go through one person to be published, a queue builds up and the research sits in it.
What we built
A public document repository on Plone. CSIRO chose Plone because it is open source and flexible, with no per-user licence to pay as more staff need access. Any of the 200 staff can log in from anywhere and publish. Workflow decides what goes live.
The collection also had to be searchable. We set up search across all of it, with filters for the type of resource (audio, photographs, policies) and a topic taxonomy underneath, so people find things by subject instead of by filename.
The documents are stored in a private government cloud in a Sydney data centre, which keeps them within Australian data sovereignty rules.
Running it
The Centre has no one in house to keep the platform patched and healthy. We do that under a service level agreement with guaranteed response times, so they have no CMS software to manage, no maintenance windows to staff and no security patches to remember.
We do not do their design work. The Centre's web manager uses Plone's Diazo theming to make design changes himself, without raising a ticket or waiting for us.
What this involved
A public document repository for a research centre of more than 200 staff
Anyone can publish, with workflow deciding what goes live
Search across the whole collection, with filters for resource type and topic
Documents held in a private government cloud in Sydney, under Australian data sovereignty rules
Support and maintenance under a service level agreement, instead of an in-house platform team
Diazo theming, so their web manager can change the design without us