[Zope] ALERT: rally to the flag, troops!

[Jean Jordaan]

Hello Zopers

This is serious business. As you know, I've been asking
questions of various levels of ineptitude during the last
few weeks. Meantime I've been building some entry-level
ZClasses as part of the insides of Mosaic's Intranet. This
culminated in a demo a couple of days ago, when I showed 
the one CEO and the rest of the communications department
what I have been doing.

Now it has filtered through that my demo has given our CEO
a great deal to think about, and that he does think that a
thoroughly collaborative intranet with distributed management
authority is the way to go. Unsurprisingly, though, this has 
sent him straight to a Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Features
Guide, as a possible Solution to All Our Problems (tm).

Said CEO obviously has the authority needed to give me the
go-ahead to use Zope.

Now I need as much input as you are prepared to give on how 
to turn this into a win-win situation. In keeping with M$'s 
new way of doing things, Exchange does support the whole 
slew of interoperability protocols like LDAP, IMAP, POP, 
HTTP, S/MIME, X.509 v3, etc, etc. It also boasts sophisticated
replication facilities for data and users. Surely there are
good ways of leveraging Exchange's functionality within Zope?

Conversely, where does Exchange fall down in a scenario like
this? As hard-nosedly technical as possible please. What does 
it tie you into? What does it take away, as seen from a Zope
perspective? How far do you get into Exchange with Python?

Further -- what are all the most considerable Zope products 
that use Exchange? I know Worldpilot does, and any IMAP client
would. But Exchange-specific stuff? Is anyone working on any
of this?

Zope is great within resource-constrained environments, but 
we don't have tight monetary or material constraints, so this
isn't as much of an issue. 

-- 
Jean Jordaan       --    technical writer    --
Mosaic Software    --    Zope 2.1.6 on WinNT and W2K