Marcel Maré wrote:

Newbie question:

I'm trying to get a grip on Zope. I'm looking for a workgroup collaboration tool (forums, document management etc.). The problem I'm facing is: most users have their information in external documents like Microsoft Word or Excel document. These are not "understood" by the Zope object database I guess. So what is the best way to handle these?

TIA

Marcel

Hi Marcel What do you mean by: "...Microsoft Word or Excel document. These are not "understood" by the Zope object database..." ??? You can store them as files in the ZODB. And serve them to users via the web. Or you can leave them in the filesysystem, let them be administrated (uploaded) through the web and served to the users through the web. http://www.zope.org/Members/jfarr/Products/LocalFS http://www.zope.org/Members/MacGregor/ExtFile Files are served with relevant MIME headers as in other webservers. So you have the same story for downloading Microsoft documents from Zope as from any other webserver (so the point is the browser configuration: you have got to have your helpers configured in the browser). Do you have special purposes in your mind ? Do you think about indexing ? There is now even a document library in developement which deals with indexing of Microsoft documents. Have a look at: http://www.zope.org/Members/Kaivo/DocumentLibrary/0.1-ReleaseNews Maybe, you want also have a look on the content management framework (CMF): http://cmf.zope.org Or a news forum on Zope: http://www.squishdot.org/ HTH --Flynt--