-----Original Message----- From: Karl Fast [mailto:fast@lights.com] Sent: Saturday, April 10, 1999 11:54 PM To: zope@zope.org Subject: [Zope] the big 3: directory, search, news
1. A directory hierarchy that structures all content on the intranet. This part of an intranet is sometimes called a "Mini-Yahoo."
'Structure' is implicit in Zope. I'm not sure if you've discovered Zope's powerful mechanism called Acquisition, but with it you can design your application structure like a building, first you build the foundation, then add things to it in a sensible way. For this particular item I would say Zope excells better than most 'portal' products.
2. A search field connecting to a search engine that indexes all pages on the intranet.
Zope 1.10.2 does come with indexing machinery, and it's *fast*. The only thing is that it's pretty low level stuff, there isn't much for anyone to use unless they want to get their hands dirty with some Python. We have two products that use this quite alot, Tabula and Cataloging, but neither are Open Source. As I understand it there *may* be plans in the future to release these products to the community but I'm not sure, they keep us lowly developers in a small dark cave with 386s. In this area I'd say Zope scores a C+, but is learning fast.
3. Current news about the company and employee interests. Typically, the intranet home page can replace traditional employee newsletters and the flood of email announcements and memos that reduce productivity in many companies. Coupling the news listings with an archive and a good search engine ensures that employees can retrieve information as needed and frees them from having to store and manage local copies (something that is very expensive considering the poor information management capabilities of current email software).
Hmm.. This sounds more like a specific web application then a fundemental feature of the framework. I would say that a product like this could be easily done with the two existing groupwear applications that exist, Confera and NotMail.
Assuming he's write, and assuming that the Zope is being used on intranets and intranet-like environments, I'm wondering if these types of things exist for Zope. If yes, where are they and how powerful are they? If not, would it be useful to build them and have them either included with zope or readily downloaded. The more zope can do out of the box, the better. Yes?
Absolutely.
Now I know what you're thinking, "Hey, a volunteer". I would love to, but I'm just learning zope and python and have been sick for nearly 3 weeks, putting me 5 or 6 weeks behind. I'm swamped. No time. Not enough experience. Documentation, maybe. Code, not right now.
Yeah yeah, excuses excuses. :)
Oh, the Nielsen column is here:
Intranet Portals: The Corporate Information Infrastructure April 4, 1999 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990404.html
Cool. Thanks for the input.