I replied to seb, because his message summarizes the suggestions I've received. Thanks to all who responded, even if it was only commiseration. I'm looking at webdrive, but we have 500+ plus PCs in nine locations encompassing six countries and three US states, so I'm not sure that's really gonna fly.... Yes, seb, I did search the archives first, but your response prompted me to try again, and I have discovered that Zope 2.4+ includes a workaround for some of the M$-DAV problems. No one apparently noticed that I said I was still on Zope 2.3. I've done some preliminary tests with Zope 2.5 that are successful with Office 2K so far. It won't solve the Outlook problem, but I haven't seen any evidence yet that even SharePoint can do that, so I may be safe there. I do believe that DC or someone else should look at adding SMB to Zope. M$, especially Office, is the standard in the corporate world, and as long as someone with an impressive title but little technical knowledge can claim that Zope doesn't work with some facet of Office, no matter how obscure, they'll have an excuse to remove or refuse Zope. For anyone else reading and wondering about a solution - it looks like WebDrive and Zope 2.5 are the best ideas I've been given so far. However, it may still come down to some very good advice from Ron, who didn't copy the list on his response, but who I will quote here (with his permission):

Having been down the route you now find yourself, I can only give you this advice: Take benchmarks of current performance levels and record them somewhere where you won't forget about it. Record how much the Linux/Zope software is costing your company (THAT should be easy to calculate:)). Then, give in to the Beast of Redmond and switch over everything to M$.

Yes, I am as die-hard Linux fan as you certainly are, however you are competing not against your company management, but against Microsoft. Your battlefield is not computer science or technology but marketing. On that battlefield, your weapons are useless. Your company would make a mistake by switching over to MS. You know that, and I know that, but your management doesn't know that and there really isn't anything that you can do about it.

What you can do is save your job, bite your tongue, and do the switch. Just keep track of how much it costs your company and the reduction in performance. Then you can pull out the Linux/Zope data and you will have an "I told you so" when things (inevitably) go wrong.

<small snip>

Sorry that I couldn't be of more help, but your problems are due to a failure of management, not technological. No amount of coaching from this list will cure that.

Ron

<sigh> Well put, Ron. The core of the problem is marketing brainwashing, which isn't my area. Well, I can at least fight it until they tell me I have no other choice. Sorry for cluttering the list with my long, sad tale. Thanks again to all. Craig

-----Original Message----- From: seb bacon [mailto:seb@jamkit.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 4:01 AM To: Dunigan, Craig Cc: 'zope@zope.org' Subject: Re: [Zope] Help! The suits are taking away my Zope!

Craig,

I don't have any direct suggestions to help, other than a conviction that what you want *can* be done. I *think* it is possible to hack around the m$ webdav deficiencies; others may be able to help more on this topic. Have you searched the list archives? I think ChrisW and Andreas and Shane have all talked aobut this before.

On the point about drive letters: one solution is to use webdrive, about which I've heard good things:

http://www.webdrive.com

good luck. I hope you don't have to struggle with sharepoint :-(

seb