Plone helps in crisis
Plone is the new CMS under the UNJLC portal since end 2005. News and Press Release.
UNJLC (www.unjlc.org) is the United Nation inter-agency facility which mission is to co-ordinate and optimise the logistics capabilities of humanitarian organisations in large-scale emergencies.
UNJLC co-ordination tasks are largely performed through the internet, and through the UNJLC website as central repository to store logistics data and information from the crisis regions. During emergencies the website has to be always up-to-date and providing regular informations.
Recently UNJLC had to front an internal emergency: the website resided on a proprietaty CMS and the CMS provider gave up bussiness with only a three month notice. UNJLC had to find, choose and deploy a new portal application in a very short time and quickly made its moves:
- turn on Open Source Software
- use Plone, as a leading OSS CMS application
- engage Zope Europe Association, due to its role in the Plone / Zope Community, and to its attitude, which fits the values of the organization.
Reflab acted as prime contractor of ZEA and was in charge of the customer relationship, project management and supervision of other ZEA partners involved in the project. The team deployed the new site on time with all content migrated, and custom features implemented.
Now Plone is the underlayng application for UNJLC portal and, at the cost of the loss of some proprietary functions, brought a clean and clever migration, lots of opportunities to improve UNJLC service through custom features, and all the advantages of an OSS solution.