[Zope] the big 3: directory, search, news

[Michel Pelletier]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Karl Fast [mailto:fast@lights.com]
> Sent: Saturday, April 10, 1999 11:54 PM
> To: zope@zope.org
> Subject: [Zope] the big 3: directory, search, news
> 
> 

> 1. A directory hierarchy that structures all content on the intranet.
>    This part of an intranet is sometimes called a "Mini-Yahoo."

'Structure' is implicit in Zope.  I'm not sure if you've discovered
Zope's powerful mechanism called Acquisition, but with it you can design
your application structure like a building, first you build the
foundation, then add things to it in a sensible way.  For this
particular item I would say Zope excells better than most 'portal'
products.
> 
> 2. A search field connecting to a search engine that indexes all pages
>    on the intranet. 

Zope 1.10.2 does come with indexing machinery, and it's *fast*.  The
only thing is that it's pretty low level stuff, there isn't much for
anyone to use unless they want to get their hands dirty with some
Python.  We have two products that use this quite alot, Tabula and
Cataloging, but neither are Open Source.  As I understand it there *may*
be plans in the future to release these products to the community but
I'm not sure, they keep us lowly developers in a small dark cave with
386s.  In this area I'd say Zope scores a C+, but is learning fast.

> 
> 3. Current news about the company and employee interests. Typically,
>    the intranet home page can replace traditional employee 
> newsletters and
>    the flood of email announcements and memos that reduce 
> productivity in
>    many companies. Coupling the news listings with an archive 
> and a good
>    search engine ensures that employees can retrieve information as
>    needed and frees them from having to store and manage local copies
>    (something that is very expensive considering the poor information
>    management capabilities of current email software). 

Hmm.. This sounds more like a specific web application then a
fundemental feature of the framework.  I would say that a product like
this could be easily done with the two existing groupwear applications
that exist, Confera and NotMail.

> 
> Assuming he's write, and assuming that the Zope is being used 
> on intranets
> and intranet-like environments, I'm wondering if these types of things
> exist for Zope. If yes, where are they and how powerful are 
> they? If not,
> would it be useful to build them and have them either 
> included with zope
> or readily downloaded. The more zope can do out of the box, 
> the better.
> Yes?
> 
Absolutely.

> Now I know what you're thinking, "Hey, a volunteer". I would 
> love to, but
> I'm just learning zope and python and have been sick for 
> nearly 3 weeks,
> putting me 5 or 6 weeks behind. I'm swamped. No time. Not enough
> experience. Documentation, maybe. Code, not right now.

Yeah yeah, excuses excuses. :)
> 
> Oh, the Nielsen column is here:
> 
> Intranet Portals: The Corporate Information Infrastructure
> April 4, 1999
> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990404.html
> 
> 

Cool.  Thanks for the input.
> 
>