Just a note that Digital Creations has a commercial add-on, Zope Enterprise Option (ZEO) which implements a ZODB client/server arrangement, with arbitrary number of clients. Since the clients have their own object caches (which are coordinated with that of the server, inherently maintaining correct synchronization), the multiple access tends to gain significant performance benefits as well as, well, multiple access. (ZEO is not free, however - congruent to the notion that most people that need it would be doing large-scale commercial type stuff, and would be in the position to pay. Heck, _eager_ to pay.-) On rereading your note i'm not sure whether this addresses your item 5, replication/distribution. You didn't say why you wanted it - if it's multi-host access, then it does, but if it's some kind of robustness replication, then i imagine you could achieve that with actual replication of the database file (vie disk mirroring, periodic copies, whatever). Ken Manheimer klm@digicool.com

-----Original Message----- From: Bjorn Stabell [mailto:bjorn@stabell.priv.no] Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 1999 9:27 PM To: zope@zope.org Subject: [Zope] CRM and Zope

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.

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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).