[Zope-CMF] SharePoint Portal Server from Micro$oft

[Adam Davis]

FWIW, I see this slightly differently:

I agree with point 2 insofar as we are much more likely to get a
quick-to-market, functional product if the Zope/CMF community is rallied
around common tool/document adapters rather than depending on Adobe et al.
for same.

However, all the engineering in the world won't necessarily fix the
'problem' that market-share comes out of partnerships with folks like Adobe.
To the purchaser for an IT department, it might not make a difference that
Zope slices, dices, and rices Adobe's entire library of files (and can be
yours for the low, low price of free!) if Photoshop ships with a sticker
reading "Interfaces with Microsoft SharePoint Server" and mentions nothing
of Zope. What I'm getting at w/r/t Chris's point (1) is that Zope
integration with eg Adobe will carry _a lot_ more weight if Adobe endorses
it.

DC has made some small steps toward creating some ties with client tool
companies like Adobe, including appearing at the Adobe partner pavilion at
the Seybold show in Boston in April.

With the caveat that I don't make the decisions around here ;), I would
suggest that if the community has the strong desire to keep MS at bay in
this space and the willingness to work on some of the engineering details,
DC could potentially provide the corporate 'clout' that makes for
partnership opportunities.

-Adam

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Withers" <chrisw@nipltd.com>
To: "Norman Khine" <khine@btinternet.com>; "Zope-Cmf" <zope-cmf@zope.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 2:15 PM
Subject: Re: [Zope-CMF] SharePoint Portal Server from Micro$oft


> 2. "...with Corel, Adobe and others commited to providing extensions to
> their file types so that SPS can recognise them, there's an oportunity for
> third parties to use SPS to build workflow tools"

This is the key, M$ play with the other big boys to make sure they all keep
their respective monopolies.

I see only a couple of options:

1. DC approaches Corel, Adobe and the like and gets them to write extensions
for the CMF that deal with their file types. This isn't really in Corel,
Adobe (et al) 's interests as they would be socially pressured to do this
work as open source and would find it hard to sell the resulting extensions.
I may be wrong about this of course ;-)

2. We, as a community, find people who know who these apps work and make
damn sure the CMF supports these as native content types with the ability to
upload, download, checkin, checkout, put through workflow, extrac metadata,
catalog, etc. I think this is more likely, in fact a lot of the work for MS
Office docs has already been done, the others would be really nice ;-)

Anyway, that's just my £0.02, what do people think?

cheers,

Chris


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