News

As part of a recent Discovery & Analysis effort, Six Feet Up was asked by Nuance Communications to provide expert recommendations on how to improve their intranet performance. The deliverables included suggestions on hardware upgrades, database management, and a migration to Plone 4.

Six Feet Up recommended sharding (i.e. partitioning) the Nuance database, in addition to upgrading current hardware, because it is a highly scalable means to improve overall performance of high-transaction business applications. In Nuance's case, their Plone intranet was getting bogged down by their large number of users. By changing the buildout configuration to handle multiple mount points and deploy catalog sharding, performance will be optimized.

Six Feet Up also recommended migrating to Plone 4 for the following reasons:

1. Improved Site Speed: Plone is one of the fastest open-source CMS platforms on the market but Plone 4 is about 50% faster than Plone 3 overall, with big improvements for both anonymous and logged-in users.
2. Improved File Handling: Plone 4's handling of large files and media has been massively improved. Plone 4 now stores all file and image data on the file system rather than in one big database file. This increases performance and reduces resource consumption without giving up versioning or fine-grained access control.
3. Improved User Account & Group Creation: Plone 4 lets site admins create new user accounts faster than ever before, and makes it possible to choose groups for users while creating them.

Nuance will be moving to the latest version of the Plone CMS later this summer.

To find out what your organization will gain by moving to Plone 4, contact Six Feet Up.