[Zope] Zope vs. Lotus Notes/Domino

[Chuck Burdick (TT)]

Our company is beginning a project to create a complete intranet system and
move towards a more paperless office.

Naturally, Notes/Domino has been suggested as a
platform/development/delivery mechanism.  It seems, however, that Zope might
be a better environment for such an intranet system.

I would like to present Zope as an alternative to Notes to our
infrastructure group. Can you, the Zope community, help me accomplish this?
Since Lotus will probably send a rep to our site, I will need information
that is of equal professional quality.

What are the pros/cons of each environment?
How well does Zope address the goals listed below?
I don't want to start a flaming war.  I am interested in a practical
comparison.

Here are some of our goals:
 - Document management
 - Discussion boards
 - Live chat (for our support teams)
 - Knowledge bases (for our support teams and software development teams)
 - Secure document routing w/ digital signature capabilities
 - Connectivity to ALL of our back office systems - Accounting, Bug
Tracking, Trouble Tickets, HR/Payroll, small databases, etc.

Here are some of our prime concerns:
 - Scalability - many offices working together, integration of many systems,
many servers working together, many platforms working together.  When I
think of scalability, I think of these two possibilities: (1) Suppose we
open an office in Japan, and the data link is expensive.  We will probably
want a server at that location performing efficient data replication. (2)
Suppose we acquire/merge with another company.  We want to integrate their
systems with our systems.

 - Security - Encryption over the WAN and perhaps over the LAN.  Encrypted
passwords.  Reliable, secure digital signatures.  Suppose we want to have
employee's stock option agreements on the intranet.  This would need to be
secure enough to ensure privacy.  Suppose we wanted to share financials with
our London office.  We would need to ensure security over the WAN and that
only certain individuals would have access.

 - Seamless integration - Suppose we want to cross-reference our trouble
ticket database with the bug tracking database then tie into the accounting
system for support billing.

Thanks,
Chuck Burdick
Web Administrator/Developer
Trading Technologies, Inc.
 
chuck.burdick@tradingtechnologies.com
(847) 424-8844