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
On Tue, 07 Sep 1999, Bjorn Stabell wrote:
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.
Interesting. I had the same discussion with my managers and co-workers at work. (By the way, if you look at tools like Vignette and BroadVision look also at FutureTense which is supposed to be very nice. My company worked with all three of them so far and are very satisfied.) If you customer cares about money he will be looking for everything but Vignette and BroadVision. :) But this is not the point. The point is that ZOPE is an advanced Application Server, which offers all the nice things that come with regular App Servers , but in addtion has many high level features that make your life easier. So really you have to compare Zope with Application Servers like BEA WebLogic, Bluestone Saphire, Persistence PowerTier, Netscape App Server (NAS), Oracle Application Server, Lokomotive (Open Source) and Enhydra (Open Source). Vignette, BroadVision and FutureTense run on top of these Application Servers as plug-ins and applications. The problem I have with that is that they are basically another tier in the chainand slow things down. First you have a large App Server which eats up a lot of resources and then on top another Application that eats even more. You need a big machine to serve an index.html. ;) Oh, by the way, in most of the App Servers R2O (Relational to Object) mapping is not done automatically. Zope on the other hand is a small, powerful and stable application server, which I can run smoothly on my Sun SPARCStation 2 (no, not Sun Ultra 2). You may have to write some extra stuff, which BroadVision or Vignette could do for you, but the development is so much faster. Imagine Allaire ColdFusion implemented the right way in aOS independent way. WOW, THAT'S ZOPE. (I worked with ColdFusion before, also a little with some App Servers.) I predicted once, that I could develop a web site that had everything from a site map, discussion forum, chat up to personalizationin half the time, giving the client a better content management interface (ehich would be a little more low level, but by far much more powerful and structured). Okay, that is about everything I can come up with. I hope this is a help. regards, stephan -- Stephan Richter iXL - Software Designer and Engineer CBU - Physics, Computer Science and Chemistry Student
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Stephan Richter