Hi Paul,

We are focusing on Linux Expo (May 18-22, www.linuxexpo.org) as a focus point for us where a number of things are going to come together: 1) I'll be giving a speech on the business track about Open Source and Venture Capital.

I'm thrilled to see you promoting ZOPE. If you havn't seen the May issue of WIRED you should check it out. There are three articles of interest: 1) "Open Season - - why an industry of cutthroat competition is suddenly deciding good karma is great business --" Has graph that shows the ONLY OS gaining market share is Linux. ('97 to '98). Another shows Apache moving from 45% to 54% Jan 98 to Jan 99. And more interesting a 25 person Lan: Microsoft vs Linux including support: $21,453 vs $5,544 2) "Tour de Source -- A guide to the Start-ups" 22 Open Source companies listed in table Alas, Digital Creations is not listed :-) Four companies with only 10 employees are listed. How big is Digital Creations now? 3) "Free Enterprise -- An open source success story--" Good story of Cobalt a company that sells Linux servers: Cube, RaQ, CacheQube etc... Hey, I could see ZOPE being bundled in a Cobalt box either directly or perhaps more quickly as a VAR product.

2) We are working with a professional PR firm (read: expensive) to coordinate a branding overhaul and PR push. We are positioning Zope as an application server focusing on community portals. The under-discussion brand of the company is "unleashing potential", which is based on Open Source, community portal, safely delegating control, and through-the-web everything. The PR firm will cultivate opinion makers in advance, schedule one-on-one interviews, and make appropriate press releases.

Even though the PR firm is expensive, I hope they are good, i mean, GREAT ! Hopefully they are into the web and the computer industry and can get coverage with some of the previously mentioned contacts in infoworld, linuxworld, wired etc....

4) We are coordinating some software efforts to coincide with the show. For instance, beta1 of Zope2 will be ready by then, knock on wood. Also, some efforts to fill out our portal story (such as Membership, Catalog, etc.) will land.

I'd love to hear more information about the community portal idea. I know of a few organizations that would benefit from their own portals. Anyone doing this yet? -- even alpha or beta?

As part of the PR push we need some of you out there to ride the wave with us and give us some case studies. This is both crucial for Zope and a great benefit to you!

Yes, I hope to have a Case study for you. Currently I'm testing zope "on the internet" and not just my LAN with a Zope host: (Thanks Scott Robertson) http://www.codeit.com My site for now is at http://rocnet.codeit.com -bobo connor bob@rocnet.com