Prepress
The European Space Agency chooses eZ Publish
Friday 19. March 2010 - The European Space Agency won the Site of the month contest in January this year. We had a chat with Rene Kloos from ESA, who told us more about the Agency and their eZ Publish project.
eZ: Please tell us a bit about ESA.
Rene Kloos: ESA, the European Space Agency, is Europes gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europes space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
ESA is an international organisation with 18 Member States. By coordinating the financial and intellectual resources of its members, it can undertake programmes and activities far beyond the scope of any single European country.
eZ: What made ESA choose eZ Publish platform?
Rene Kloos: ESA seeks to enhance its capacity to deliver multimedia content to different target groups through different channels, the first objective being to make available the large tape-based video collection for online viewing and download.
After reviewing the system and talking to other companies it became clear that eZ Publish was the most likely candidate due to the already built-in functionality, its extensibility and last but not least its interesting business model.
eZ: Which eZ Publish features is ESA’s website using?
Rene Kloos: The site revolves around online viewing of video material and the ordering of broadcast quality clips for professional users. This has been achieved through an integration of the delivery server and a CDN, where the latter serves the MP4s.
There is webshop functionality for the ordering of the broadcast quality clips and eZ Find is the glue in all this for easy retrieval and cross-referencing.
eZ: What was the biggest challenge faced during the project?
Rene Kloos: The biggest challenge proved to be the timely delivery. This was mainly caused by several unknowns at the start of the project which had repercussions later on. All in all it was an interesting project and still is as new features and improvements are planned.
The initial development was done through eZ Systems consultancy, which worked very well. Further development will be done through an eZ Partner.
eZ: Are you planning more projects with eZ Publish?
Rene Kloos: The CMS in use for the ESA Portal is up for replacement. Although all options are still open, eZ Publish is an interesting candidate, especially after the experience gained so far. Major issue in this case will be the data migration.
eZ: Thank you for your time.