Illustration by Brendan Davis

icoya

Jeffrey Zeldman, an American Web designer, said recently that 98% of Website pages are already obsolete. He was right, because storing information directly in static html Web pages turned out to be a very bad idea. Nonetheless, it was a powerful enough bad idea to kick-start the Internet Revolution. In the rush to grab a stake in digital gold, static Web sites proliferated and then added multimedia experiences, database access and archives. But if today you grab a url at random -- which I just did, inspired by the ZopeMag fish icon to enter www.fish.com -- you never know what you’ll find. In this case, there was a list of urls for computer security papers by an unidentified author, and a second link to Yahoo!’s listing for real fish. This is not content management, but content anarchy!

Today, a well-designed Content Management System (CMS) should provide integrated information creation, editing, workflow management and publishing in a secure and end-user friendly environment. Each element of the www.fish.com site, for example, would be stored in a logical structure associated with details regarding its history and current status in the publishing process. The final target output of a CMS may be a traditional physical print publication, an online publication or a multimedia mix. There are an amazing number of these systems out there: for example, some 50 solutions are listed at: http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/cms/.

The subject of this review is, icoya OpenContent, a comprehensive CMS from the German company Struktur AG for publishing dynamic content-rich Websites, also often called “portals”.

	Sidebar - Newbies Only People completely new to Zope may find the following explanations helpful. icoya Open Content uses the Zope application server as its platform. Zope was developed over a number of years by Digital Creations, an American company now called Zope Corporation. Zope is an open-source development project with many volunteers participating around the world. Zope has established itself in corporations, governments and the non-profit sectors. Zope has quite a strong presence in Europe, as is evidenced by for example the adoption of the platform by the French Ministry of the Interior. Zope Products Zope is developed and extended using the Python high-level object friendly programing language. This is done by adding new applications (termed “products” in Zope-speak), which can be downloaded and added to an existing installation. There are some 700 products available, some of which are very useful, others less so. CMF The Content Management Framework (CMF), developed by Zope Corporation, is one of the most important extensions to Zope, providing a high-level content management architecture. Templates Even with all this software on board, there is a lot of work still to be done to complete the the final website/portal. Zope provides DTML (Document Template Language) as a Zope specific server-side markup language. More recently ZPT (Zope Page Templates) have been added because, among other things, they work well with Web Design tools like GoLive and Dreamweaver. The most recent development has been the launch of Plone 1.0, a complete end-user website/portal solution built on top of the CMF and Zope. This open-source effort is an example of a complete CMS solution.

Struktur was founded in 1995 in Stuttgart, Germany and incorporated as an AG in 2000. The board is headed by Niels Mache, who co-founded Red Hat Germany and led its development. The other two board members are Timm Dollinger (sales and support) and Patrick Walther (finance and marketing), previously at IBM and Oracle Germany. The Company has 17 employees in two business units: Product Development and Services (software and services), and the Conceptual Design Unit (Web design and flash development). Revenues come more than 90% from consulting and support activities. Struktur’s goal is to go beyond individual CMS and work to optimize the “information logistics” of exchange between companies.

Downloading and installing icoya OpenContent was straightforward on the Windows platform. The documentation is available from the Start/Program menu. The localhost server launches promptly and the browser opens a German language home page. Most of the on-screen text displayed is in German. Two example mini-demo sites can be visited directly from the home page: Tierwelt (Animal World) and Expospace (“Space Club”). Both are well designed and include flash animations. (The Expospace demo-site is also available in English at http://www.icoya.com/index_html/demosite and can be edited on-line).

Entering localhost:8080/manage takes the user directly into the Zope management interface. Here the on-screen text labels and information are in English. Customized icons in the interface show icoya/Plone/CMF additions to the Zope base platform. Opening the /icoya_start folder shows the objects that were used to assemble the home page. Clicking on the “View” tab switches between the assembled page and its listed components. This is the basic development process under Zope, which can be extended and developed almost ad infinitum by skilled consultants, business analysts and programmers.

The English User Manual provides very detailed and clear instructions for the end-user of icoya OpenContent. This covers all the main functions of a CMS: user management, editorial functions (create, edit, schedule, publish, archive), security and permissioning and import/export of media types. All these functions are available via form interfaces, which are well laid out and presented.

icoya OpenCommerce is a professional online shopping system fully integrated with the content management system icoya OpenContent 1.5. The shopping system icoya OpenCommerce supports order workflow and online credit card payment (AMEX, Visa, MasterCard) as well as payment using bank cards.

icoya OpenCollaboration Content & Collaboration Management (CCM) is the enterprise solution for information management and organisation of collaborative teams. icoya OpenCollaboration consolidates corporate information in a collaborative information hub and cost-effectively organizes business processes. icoya OpenCollaboration enables co-workers controlled (over the usual Zope security structure), secure and worldwide access to information and documents.

The following Integration Modules are also available:

• icoya PDF Producer
• icoya WordXML
• icoya Editor Integration
• icoya LDAP connector
• iocya OracleDB connector
• icoya LinkWalker
• icoya OfficeIntegration
• icoya Index

The current pricing for these is available on www.icoya.com.

The User Manual (40 pages) in English: this a comprehensive, well-written and clearly presented manual. The Zope User Guide (25 pages) is a 25 page compilation of Open Source documentation written by Zope experts and oriented towards applications developers. It includes Structured Text, Zope Page Templates and METAL macro expressions. There is other documentation in German.

	Product name icoya Description Extensible CMS system built with Zope, CMF and Plone. Release Date 21.03.2003 Version 1.5 Rating (all ratings are on scale of 1-5 with 5 sushi being the best) Usability Software Design Documentation Usefulness Categories Content Management, Portal Size N/A Requirements None - complete Package URL icoya License GPL + copyright for Plone and Zope Creator Struktur AG

Icoya OpenContent is a German product with a potentially global market .To tap that market the company will need to execute a flawless localization strategy providing native language support in each market. A Japanese language icoya information site is on-line.

icoya OpenContent 1.5 comes with enhanced functionality and integrated support services. The new version is available in two editions:

• Basic Edition (version 1.3) includes 4 weeks of installation help. EUR 99.
• Enterprise Edition (version 1.5) has more features and includes technical support starting at EUR 299 for a full year of technical assistance and software updates.

Existing icoya OpenContent customers can upgrade at preferential prices.

Among Struktur AG's clients are DaimlerChrysler AG, DWS Investment GmbH, Egon Zehnder International GmbH, ETRANS AG, Horvath & Partner GmbH, the Baden-Württemberg Regional Authority for Compensation and Benefits, Southwest German Public Radio, TRADOS GmbH and Ed. Züblin AG.

Struktur AG has done a good job in bringing together all the pieces and producing a complete out-of-the-box CMS solution, using the most recent Open Source developments. Much of the credit, of course, has to go to the Open Source community, but Struktur adds value and offers support at a reasonable entry-level price. The attention to detail and clarity of design are very positive features. The documentation is above average. Starting from this product, designers and developers can build almost any kind of content-oriented application. Indeed, icoya is well-positioned to move into the broader area of Web services and business-to-business interchange, given the proviso as mentioned above with respect to localization.

Struktur AG
Junghansstraße 5, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany
T + 49. 711. 89 66 56 0 F + 49. 711. 89 66 56 10
info@struktur.de