Epson Electronics America (EEA) has come a long way from the static HTML page it was running in 1998. Later EEA's Executive Director for New Business Roy DaSilva was given the responsibility to meet the need for a dynamic site and deal with the exorbitant licensing and maintenance costs. This led DaSilva to begin a migration to a site built with open source tools running on a Linux server.

Just to highlight a few issues that DaSilva had to think about/get around:

• to migrate the site to dynamic code in order to provide useful, on-the-fly information to support sales reps, distributors, and internal staff.
• Reduce software & maitenance costs - It was really expensive to maintain the static site - Proprietary tools were licensed at "astronomically high prices
• Easy migration
• Facilitate - Outsourced Development - Need to also keep a view on Development Fees
• products that would "be around for a period of time."

After extensive market research, and finally decided to use the Zope open source Web application server and Plone content management system (CMS) as the framework on which to build the site.

One of the reasons they went with Zope is because the United States Navy was using it. "No pun intended, but we thought, with the Navy afloat, we'll be afloat," DaSilva says. "We did not want to get into something that would be here today and gone tomorrow. We were trying to minimize our risk."

EEA liked what it saw in Zope and the open source concept, and decided to put together a site completely based on open source tools. DaSilva hired a company called Cignex to do the development. At the time, DaSilva says, there weren't too many developers with open source experience, but Cignex "had capabilities," and eventually became a certified Zope trainer and a strategic partner with EEA instead of just a Contractor.

Source: NewsForgePrashanth RaiTag(s):CMS,open+source, Content Management System