[Zope] KnotMail, Portal Toolkit, WebDAV --Best Collaboration

[Chris Petrilli]

Everything below should be taken with a grain of salt, and a lot of
handwaving, but it's at least the "vision" I was preaching at Linux
Expo.

> I'm excited to see that the Zope Portal Toolkit will be here soon.
> http://www.zope.org/Products/PortalToolkit/Tour/

Please understand this will be EARLY EARLY access, and many things (the
Catalog especially) are subject to huge architectural changes.  In
UnifiedSpeak, we are only now just beginning the elaboration phase.

> Hopefully there are plans to "Walk the walk" with the Portal
> Toolkit for the Zope community.  By this I mean, Subscribers
> to this mail list (and others) should be able to "Become a Member...
> by visiting  a Zope portal home page..."

This is definitely the goal of the new Zope site that we have been
thinking about... what features it includes initially are subject to
change.
 
> ***---
> 
> So far, I prefer mail lists because I can organize them into
> folders and search using my EMail Client.  I see a benefit
> and occasionally use the web based egroups copy when 
> I'm not at my primary computer.

There has been some handwaving (mostly by myself, but also by Ken) about
connecting Mailman and Zope together, and using Zope as a repository for
archives, but also providing access via NNTP.  This however, isn't even
on the "to do list" or even the "things to consider putting on the to do
list", so don't hold your breath.  Adding support shouldn't be that bad,
but ... someone's gotta write the code.

> It looks like the product KnotMail, shown as part of the
> Portal toolkit could perform many if not all the functionality
> of my e-mail client but be on THE server so I can access
> it anywhere with any browser. 

KnotMail is a very basic interface to an IMAP repository, it's not
intended to be a full function client.  It's just a "proof of concept"
at this point.  Someone is welcome to take the idea further, it was just
a small GUI put together by Michel to show off his IMAPAdapter, but is
hardly aimed as a full function live and breath Web mail client.  It's
missing 90% of the features you'd need for that.

Having said that, please feel free to add features ;-)

> ***---
> Some Mail could evolve into a slashdot.org type format such
> as  Story and Comments.  I really like the way that comments
> are moderated and promoted and demoted on a scale
> -1,0,1,2,3,4,5  Then, a user can set a threshold so that only
> the "best" messages (just 4's and 5's for example) are viewed.

This is what the "Tracker" is for... I don't know if Tracker will make
it out soon or not, it's functional, but not "feature complete" or even
that stable at this point.  It provides the concept of projects and
items and tracking work on those items.  It's very cool, but it's got a
ways to go.

> ***---
> WebDAV has been discussed but this seems to have a place
> when collaborating on documentation but not for general discussion.
> (I admit to knowing little about WebDAV and would love to see
> a working example)

WebDAV is great, except for the fact that there are no really good
clients ;-) Microsoft has one in IE5, and theoretically in Office2000,
but they've not even written a server yet, and until there's a full
Class 2 client to go with it, it's really not something I'd shove into
my business process for anything beyond basic updates. 

Just some noise...please understand that DC is not short of ideas, nor
is the Zope community... we are simply short of people willing to
contribute code to bring those ideas to fruition.  The more the
community pitches in to actually create functional products, the more
the community benefits.

Chris