Summary

MAXIMA Multimedia, an Israeli interactive media consultancy, with offices in New York, finds a robust e-commerce solution for a non-profit client with a limited budget.

Case Facts

MAXIMA Multimedia interactive consultancy combines expertise in content, design and technology. The Jewish Publication Society (JPS), a non-profit publisher of high-quality books on the Bible and Jewish culture, turned to MAXIMA to develop its web site . The first generation of the site, developed a year ago, was hand crafted with an e-commerce catalog using Perl and CGI scripts.

Problem

Being a non-profit organization, JPS has limited resources and budgets. It is a medium sized publisher with a large back list, and lots of front list titles appearing seasonally. These titles often win awards or get good press, and the web site needs to be updated quickly to take advantage of special events or highlight special promotions.

The hand crafted site was difficult to maintain in a timely fashion. The e-commerce solution was inflexible. These issues became more acute as the site matured and the content grew.

JPS needed a solution that:

allows them to easily maintain and add content and the book catalog on their own
allows them to add new, non-book products to the catalog
is cost-effective

Solution

Over the past year MAXIMA had moved into using Zope exclusively as its technology platform. The JPS project was an opportunity to move to a Zope-based e-commerce solution. With JPS's limited budget, MAXIMA wanted to find an "off-the-shelf" solution to cut costs. Fortunately, Adroit's e-commerce solution was available (http://e-tailer.adroit.net/).

The Zope-based solution took about two months to deploy. MAXIMA was able to provide JPS with a site that allows them to manage the content and catalog on their own in a timely fashion. The new catalog is far more flexible and robust than the old solution, and can serve as an e-commerce platform for all of MAXIMA's clients.

MAXIMA Multimedia's managing director, Aron Trauring, explains why Zope has become MAXIMA's exclusive technology platform:

"Zope has many advantages over the alternatives. Of course it has a high level of feature and function, but that we expect in any product we use. It's Python-based persistent object oriented model makes it more flexible and easier to develop with than Java. It's open source nature allows us to customize it completely."
"Being open source has other advantages. A large developer community has grown up around Zope and developed packages, such as Adroit's e-commerce solution and Neuberger & Hughes' WorldPilot, which saves us a huge amount of time and effort.

"In short, Zope is a platform that allows us to develop sophisticated, state-of-the-art solutions for our clients at reasonable costs."