Looking for consultants willing to implement cocoon in Switzerland or Germany

[Peter Hogenkamp <pe...@hogenkamp.com>]

Dear all

Sorry, if this is off-topic. But as I suppose that some people on this list make their living in IT Consulting, some of them might be interested.

We're a Zurich based start-up, preparing to publish short Internet guidebooks on paper (DTP with QuarkXPress) and on the Web (both HTML pages and PDF files), targeting the German speaking countries. I am a strong believer in both, XML and open source, and, without knowing too much about it, I quite like the concept of Cocoon. However, I am not really a techie, nor is anybody in my company, so we would not be able to implement it ourselves.

Two questions:
1. Has Cocoon evolved to a stage yet where professional installations as a mission critical CMS make sense?
2. Are there any consultants in Germany or Switzerland who would be willing to take on the job of implementing it? If so, please contact me.

Thanks.

Peter

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  Peter Hogenkamp   Zeix AG                    phone +41  1 247 78 78
                    Stauffacherstrasse 96        fax +41  1 247 78 88
                    Postfach 2522             mobile +41 79 634 12 03
                    CH-8026 Zürich                peter@hogenkamp.com
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Re: Looking for consultants willing to implement cocoon in Switzerland orGermany

[Ulrich Mayring <ul...@denic.de>]

> Peter Hogenkamp wrote:
> 
> Dear all
> 
> Sorry, if this is off-topic. But as I suppose that some people on this
> list make their living in IT Consulting, some of them might be
> interested.

Not off-topic, for me at least a very interesting question.

> We're a Zurich based start-up, preparing to publish short Internet
> guidebooks on paper (DTP with QuarkXPress) and on the Web (both HTML
> pages and PDF files), targeting the German speaking countries. I am a
> strong believer in both, XML and open source, and, without knowing too
> much about it, I quite like the concept of Cocoon. However, I am not
> really a techie, nor is anybody in my company, so we would not be able
> to implement it ourselves.
> 
> Two questions:
> 1. Has Cocoon evolved to a stage yet where professional installations
> as a mission critical CMS make sense?

CMS = Color Management System? :)

The interesting part of your agenda is the coupling of QuarkXPress (or
any other authoring software) with XML and cocoon. Or, more generally
speaking, the question of cross-media publishing. I have banged my head
on exactly this issue for many years from a prepress point of view with
little results except knowledge gained. Now that I've switched from
prepress to Internet, I am looking at it from the other point of view,
but it doesn't get less complicated :-)

But with XML, fop and cocoon a previously missing factor was introduced
(although I am sure the developers have not the slightest idea or
interest of what their cocoon could do for the prepress industry). I
have experimented with the cocoon-side of publishing paper documents by
generating PDFs via fop. This works amazingly well (although there are
commercial alternatives to fop worth looking at), in fact so well that I
implemented our mass-mailing workflow entirely in XML/fop/cocoon. This
means we automatically create PDFs, which start as XML and incorporate
data from a database. Not just addresses, but real transactional data.

Building interactive authoring tools for this type of workflow is as
simple as making an HTML page with a form. The user fills in data in
some fields and cocoon generates a PDF for him, that he can fax or
print. Our helpdesk uses this tool to answer FAQs - they simply check
the appropriate answer(s) on the HTML page, enter a fax number and press
a button. In the background a PDF is generated and faxed out to the
customer.

So, this part of the equation is ready for prime-time, with the
exception of performance. If you have large transactions and many users,
then cocoon1 may not be for you. In our case it is fast enough. The
current limitations are XSL:FO (which is missing some features useful
for prepress) and fop (which doesn't implement all of XSL:FO yet).
Another thing is that images embedded in PDFs must be compressed,
otherwise the PDFs become too large - I know this was on the fop agenda,
but don't know whether they've done it already.

The other part of the equation, especially if it's QuarkXPress, can be
very frustrating. FrameMaker or other XML-aware authoring tools come to
mind, however I still believe in OpenSource someday supplying this part
as well. KOffice sounds promising, for example. Quark wants to sell
their Quark-DMS, they have less to do with OpenSource than a bicycle in
China (or so ;-)

> 2. Are there any consultants in Germany or Switzerland who would be
> willing to take on the job of implementing it? If so, please contact
> me.

I can give you some advice, but not take on the whole project :)

Ulrich

-- 
Ulrich Mayring
DENIC eG, Systementwicklung