Hi there, We're currently evaluating customer relationship management (CRM) solutions for future projects. The main contenders are BroadVision and Vignette so far, but it's hard to navigate the forest of CRM solutions. Looking at Zope I'm amazed at the flexibility already existing in the product, and knowing the power of open source and a committed community of developers often associated with beautiful systems like Zope (software is like art and so it can be beautiful), it's only going to get better. I am, however, concerned with Zope's maturity and comprehensiveness compared to current state-of-the-art commercial solutions. I'd like to hear other people's opinions as well. In particular I'd like to know about: 1) Work-flow. Zope doesn't seem to have any inherent work-flow capabilities, so I guess that'll have to be developed? Is anyone working on tools and toolkits for this? 2) Personalization. Again, this can undoubtably be developed in Zope, but is anyone working on toolkits to lift the personalization features to a higher level? Something similar to Vignette's self-learning ability (and collaborative filtering like NetPerceptions), and having a business layer that allows business types to do targeting is also useful. 3) Content management. With big websites you need content management systems that'll help you keep the content consistent and up-to-date. Again, this will have to be developed in Zope. 4) Scalability. How scalable is Zope when it comes to handling many requests, and how does it perform when the database grows? Are there any inherent limitations? 5) Replication, distribution. Can the Zope database be replicated and the copies kept synchronized? If not, does anyone have an idea how much work it'll be to develop this in Zope (it should be possible to do this at a pretty low level, transparently, just above the object database layer). The good news is that Zope is already so flexible that I think it won't take much work, relatively speaking, to develop modules that'll lift Zope up to the same level as commercial solutions. Any efforts going on already? Bye, -- Bjorn Stabell <bjorn.stabell@ogilvy.com> CTO OgilvyInteractive, Beijing