[Zope] CRM and Zope

[Stephan Richter]

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