Objectis is edited by Pilot Systems and Blue Dynamics, which engage their own responsibility and credibility on this service.

About Pilot Systems

Pilot Systems is an open source solutions integrator, specialized in content management systems deployment. Since 2000, we have choosen to work in Python and Zope environments, then end of 2002 Plone. We were the first company to make this strategic choice in France.

Have a look at the Crédit Municipal de Paris web site to see how we deal with Plone integration in large projects.

For further informations about Pilot Systems, visit our site : www.pilotsystems.net.

About BlueDynamics

BlueDynamics is also a Software Company which basically works with Python, Zope and Plone.
As a 100% OpenSource Company, BlueDynamics sponsors and supports Plone and the Zope Europe Association.
More Infos on BlueDynamics may be found on the BlueDynamics commercial site (German only), as well as on the Open Community Portal from BlueDynamics.

Little History

In the beginning (end of 2002 and beginning 2003), Objectis was meant to be a free Zope hosting service with the goal of assuring the global promotion of Zope and offering a test platform for users to evaluate the technology. This was similar to the model of our peers, FreeZope.

Development

Development was several months long with a strong push added around June 2003. This first version of the site objectis.org was redeveloped to:

• Move to a multilingual Plone site from the original site done in Zope with Localizer
• Add the option for users to open Plone accounts in addition to Zope accounts

It was at this period that an ingenious systems was put in place to dynamically manage le sub-domains of objectis.net.

Launch

The service was officially lauched on the 3rd of October, 2003. The site was then available in two languages, French and English, with the addition of Russian by the 30th of October.

The launch was very well received indeed, with almost 50 accounts created in the first 24 hours. The statistics started around 62 visits a day and rose to 169 by November 2003, only a month after the launch.

Today's Activity

We host 2480 accounts, of which 1700 are in Plone 1 et 340 in Plone 2. The statistics keep rising with 430 daily visits to the objectis.org site and 2300 daily visits to the various user sites on objectis.net. Roughly 50 sites are modified each day. Six instances are dedicated to this service: one Zope instance, four Plone 1 instances and one instance Plone 2.

Forum

The forum was initially built around the newsitem object of Plone. We quickly decided to put a more robust solution in place.

The forum has, over time, become a great asset of the service. The response time by the support team is nearly always less than 12 hours.

The forum was originally dedicated to questions about Objectis only and we would reject questions about the technology in general, that is to say questions about Python, Zope and Plone.

Faced with the obvious need of the users, the forum has become an open discussion arena for the French and international communities. In addition to the French forum, questions are being posted to the English, Spanish, German and Chinese forums.

Launch of Plone 2

Implementation of Plone 2 was to have been fast and easy, as soon as the official launch by the Plone Team. However, an unexpected problem appeared whereby the manager of a Plone site would lose all his permissions until the instance was restarted. In spite of this 340 Plone 2 accounts were created during this period - and this in spite of a warning writ large on the main Objectis page announcing that Plone 2 accounts were at risk of being restarted at any moment during the troubleshooting of the bug. This situation has shown the community's impatience to test, evaluate and deploy Plone 2 solutions.

Today, thanks to the help of Phil Auersperg and Jérôme Sandarnaud, the problem is fixed. Opening a Plone 2 account is now open and working properly.

The Future of Objectis

The priorities are :

• To give maximum support to the users
• To add a maximum of languages, with Arabic, Brasilian Portuguese, Hebrew and Italian earmarked for the near future
• To allow users to upgrade their free Objectis accounts to a professional hosting option, allowing the management of a domain name within the Objectis account, much more storage space, a more reponsive technical support and a guarantee of service that isn't available with the free accounts
• At the same time, this professional option will finance an upgrade to the storage capacity of the free accounts as well as the addition of the domain name management - to be continued...

For more information about the changes coming to Objectis, please post to the forum or contact David Sapiro.