Apoorv Durga's Blog

Okay, so I tried my hands on a couple of CMSes that let me manage PPTs. Of the lot, I liked Xaraya (using John's theme - Thanks John for providing that). I couldn't even get the others up and running. This is not to blame those products. I am sure they are good products but I was limited by my lack of PHP and Python skills.

Although, not a CMS, I also liked ReportLab's PythonPoint.

I successfully created a PoC, demonstrating how easy it is to achieve content independence in presentations. Unfortunately, I am back to using PPTs :(. This is primarily because most business guys are very comfortable with Powerpoint and most customers use that.
Secondly, powerpoint provides these business guys the power to make a presentation the way they want whereas a CMS would impose descpline, which sadly most people donot like.
Thirdly, the fact remains that these implementations are still much behind Powerpoint. One cannot achieve "build effects", format images by dragging mouse pointer, navigate from one slide to another. For example, in Xaraya, it is difficult to change the order of slides in your publication. If I created 15 slides and want to show 5 to one person and another set of 10 to others, I cannot "hide" certain slides. Essentially, i need to create a different publication for each slide deck, which basically defeats the purpose of using a CMS - I have to enter content multiple times!!

I am still trying and would love to be proven wrong.

In my role, I have to talk to clients almost everyday and give them a presentation about our Portals and CM expertise. A major part of that is Case Studies. Because of the nature of things here, the format of powerpoint slides for case studies changes very frequently even though the content of a case study remains more or less similar - Challenges, How we did it, Business benefits etc.

I've been wondering if I could use some sort of a CMS and input all these things as text and then depending on Client or context, just generate a different PPT.

The good and ever helpful folks at cms-forum gave me some good pointers. Although I cannot use Powerpoint but their are really good alternatives such as:

1. S5 by Eric Meyer - http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
2. John Cox's implementation at
   http://www.wyome.com/index.php?module=articles&func=view&ptid=11&theme=slideshow_manta
3. http://www.enfoldsystems.com/Products/Open/PloneS5
4. http://www.visiomode.com/slideshow/
5. http://www.feedstream.com/XML2Flash/Demo1/Presentation.htm
6. http://www.reportlab.org/python_point.html

(2), (3) and (4) above are basically implementations of Eric's S5. I like the idea and have been playing around with them. My main problem is that I donot know PHP and Python. So i am planning to borrow this idea and integrate it with OpenCMS or some other java based system. The idea is simple - Generate an html (or JSP) file and apply S5 templates over that.

Sizing Portal applications during Pre-sales activities

More and more customers have been asking for sizing inputs during RFP phase itself. Sizing depends on many factors and hence it is not a trivial exercise to arrive at sizing information at this stage. Some of the inputs that are required for sizing are:

• Page views per second
• Hits per second
• Hit to cache ratio
• Think time of users
• Service time
• Concurrent sessions
• Ratio of static and dynamic pages
• Usage of SSL
• Usage of clusters

The above is only a partial listing. During the pre-sales stage, some customers might be able to give an idea of expected hits per second. However, if one were to ask a customer about number of portlets on a page to arrive at possible caching, most customers will be lost for ideas. Hence it is important to educate the customer that sizing at this stage can only be indicative and a correct figure can only be arrived at after a detailed analysis.

Approaches for Sizing

There are essentially three approaches for arriving at sizing recommendations:

1. Sizing based on some algorithm and formulae
2. Sizing based on Proof-of concept
3. Sizing based on benchmarked applications


The first approach (Sizing based on some algorithm and formulae) is probably more scientific and logical than others. However, portal applications are a completely new breed of applications and are evolving at a rapid pace. Hence there is not enough historical data to arrive at an algorithm to predict accurate sizing. Secondly, any algorithm or formulae will require inputs that will be difficult to obtain during pre-sales stage.

The second approach (Sizing based on Proof-of concept) will possibly give most accurate results. However, it is time and resource consuming and can not be carried out during the pre-sales stage.

The last approach (Sizing based on benchmarked applications) provides an optimal method to arrive at sizing recommendations. It is based on a set of assumptions and is based on a set of benchmarked applications. In this approach, the customer application is compared with a benchmark application using same or similar technologies. The results are extrapolated to arrive at approximate sizing figures.

I have a working example of this approach. Mail me if you need one.

Updated: 20th May, 2005

PJ has posted a nice one on sizing here