Plymouth College of Art

Migrating a College's intranet to a reliable and scalable platform

The challenge

Plymouth College of Art is one of only four remaining further and higher specialist art and design colleges in the country.  It is responsible locally, regionally, nationally and internationally for providing excellence in Art and Design education and training. To assist its staff the College operates an intranet portal based on Plone.  In 2009 the platform started showing serious performance issues; it also raised privacy concerns due to pages being sometimes displayed outside their authorization realm.

The solution

fry examined the situation in detail.  We pinpointed the piece of 3rd party software causing the privacy issue and recommended a route to scale the intranet application to cope well with its new usage levels. We were then asked to carry out the portal migration from the old Windows-based platform to a platform based on SuSE Linux Enterprise. We also provided Zope ZEO clustering setup to scale the application up, and a load balancing frontend.

Additionally, our web developers have been asked to extend the Plone product deployment on the College's portal. This way we have been able to help the College both with their web development and their systems needs in the scope of a single support contract.

The result

Our hosting solution has demonstrably resolved the College's intranet portal's privacy issue and the users reported the site as being significantly more responsive after migration to the new platform.