Introduction: Plone, IIS and the Enterprise

CMS for the Enterprise

Plone needs to be used with a high performance web server and probably  a proxy server. What are our choices?

The most popular deployment scenario involves running Plone on a linux box with Apache server. This offers  advantages. You gain the advantages of a UNIX control environment as well as the wide availability of open source tools. Apache server, for example, contains many free configurable modules and log analyzers. The typical hosting company might have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, Php) hosting environment already set up, even if it  offers a python hosting plan.

In the meantime, enterprise  networks are still (for the most part) Windows-based.  Workers still use Windows  desktops and laptops  (though Macs and Ubuntu has certainly made significant inroads over the last few years).  Company administrators usually have substantial background and experience configuring servers in a Windows environment and connecting them to users and groups with Active Directory. In addition, a large number of third party tools have emerged to assist system administrators in routine tasks. Many Microsoft  administrators are comfortable configuring Internet Information Services (IIS) and integrating different kinds of websites under IIS.  For these kinds of organizations, being able to integrate well with the rest of the Windows corporate network is an important criteria for selecting a CMS.

This article shows how a system administrator could configure multiple Plone  sites  in a Windows enterprise environment using a commercial product called Enfold Proxy. Enfold Proxy is a lightweight plugin to IIS that lets you handle Plone sites more easily. We will  start with a quick tour of how to use the wysiwig configuration tool to set up IIS to handle Plone site(s). Later,   we'll cover  how Enfold  Proxy  uses   built-in functionality in  IIS to  accomplish these tasks and how to customize them for your needs.  Note: this is not an open source product, and it is not free (it costs a few hundred dollars, depending on your support plan).

With Enfold Proxy, Zope clients and servers can still run from Linux boxes (or Windows boxes) and still  be able to harness the site administration and performance-enhancing features of IIS. Using Plone with IIS and Enfold Proxy   not only provides  a caching solution,  it  also makes it easy to integrate non-Plone material on the same domain as a Plone site.

IIS 7  and Vista Support

The 4.5  release of Enfold Proxy will be available in the first half of September 2008.  Version  4.5 will include official support for IIS 7 on Vista 32 bit. Previously IIS 7  worked, but it was not officially supported by Enfold.  (Read more about how Enfold Proxy works with IIS 7 ).  IIS 7 on 64 bit is still being tested.