Plone 3 Intranets : design, build, and deploy a reliable, full-featured, and secure Plone-based enterprise intranet easily from scratch ; [community experience distilled

In Detail Plone is widely used for creating feature-rich and secure enterprise intranets. Each company has different goals, architecture, hierarchy, and size and requires a very different intranet to manage its business. No matter what size, or what purpose, Plone offers solutions to the most common intranet needs, and more. If you've never built an intranet before, you don't even have programming skills, or you don't have any experience with CMSs, this practical guide targeted at people with no previous experience with Plone is the most suitable book for you. Starting from scratch, it will show you how to design and build a feature-rich, secure corporate intranet easily, by optimizing the features of Plone. It will guide you from the initial setup through Plone basics, security, and workflow-related topics, ending with the most common deployment techniques. It will help you learn how to use content types effectively for your intranet. You will learn how to manage the life cycle of your documents and content in general using workflows. It will teach you how to manage security and access to your content granularly. You will learn to manage local users, and get to know about the mechanisms that Plone makes available to the users to manage their data. This step-by-step book will also show you how to choose the right add-on products for your site, and how to enhance your intranet by using them efficiently. At the end, you will learn how to deploy your intranet and make your site live for your users. Build your own Plone-based intranet easily and successfully by focusing on effective usage of content type, security, content life cycle, and suitable Plone add-ons Approach This is a step-by-step guide, from installing your first Plone instance to deploying your intranet. Each chapter will show you an essential aspect that your intranet should have. However, each chapter is isolated enough to serve as a reference manual for later use. The book is packed with examples and useful screenshots for easy learning. Who this book is for This book is for anyone who needs to build an intranet with no limits on capabilities or features. Even if you don't have previous CMS experience or programming skills, this book is for you. Targeted at beginners with no previous experience with Plone, this book will teach you step by step and at the end you should have a full-featured, reliable, and secure intranet. Victor Fernandez de Alba's Plone 3 Intranets isn't just about Plone 3, and it isn't just about intranets. Nearly all of the material in the book is equally applicable to Plone 4. And, in addition to intranets, this book is really about any content-management situation where there is delegated authority over content management. Plone's great strength is in the collaborative production of web content, whether for public or internal consumption. It gives managers the tools they need to delegate authority for production, editing and reviewing of content, and it gives authors, editors and managers a great user interface for doing their work in a way that allows them to concentrate on content. Plone 3 Intranets is all about that great strength. Its target audience is site administrators who want to learn how to administer users and groups, assign roles in content creation and management, use workflow rules to shepherd content, and to control the availability of content. The subject does not require a knowledge of Plone development, and the book does not require a knowledge of Python, HTML or CSS. Instead, it's about administering, and planning the administration of a site using Plone itself. It also occasionally delves into the interface of the Zope application server, which underlies Plone, when that would help the reader understand important details about security or workflow. This is no "Dummies" book. The target audience is smart enough to understand a concept like granular security and ready to map security concepts onto the needs of their own organization. Plone 3 Intranets is very well written. It contains some of the clearest explanations of users and group administration, sharing and workflow of any of the current Plone books. The quality of the prose is definitely a cut above Packt's common product. There is getting to be a wealth of books covering Plone 3 and 4, and it's worth figuring out where a new one fits in the list. Plone 3 Intranets and Erik Rose's Plone 3 for Education are both basically concerned with same environment: one with lots of content, content creators, and a need to organize and administer that content. Erik's book is for the developer programatically adapting Plone to the specifics of a given enterprise. Victor's book is for the planner and administrator. The reader of this review should know: Packt gave me a free e-book version of this book. Also, I'm the co-author of one Packt book (Practical Plone), for which I received initial royalties, and have been a technical reviewer for several others, for which I received free copies of the reviewed book and another Packt title. The Plone Foundation, for which I am an un-recompensed officer, receives continuing royalties from Packt for Practical Plone.