[Zope] Higher Educatoin Portal/Admin

[Dario Lopez-Kästen]

Greetings!

I'd like to know if there are any activities regarding use of Zope to
build/support educational systems. I have searched the list and there seem
to be a few, but I cannot find out how to contact the peoiple involved.

My main interest lies in building administrative systems that ease the task
of planning and administering courses, staff and student info, schedules,
publishing info about courses, events, etc, as well building or supporting
systems that will let teachers build and integrate on-line courses with
existing admin systems (although this is secondary; there are better systems
that do this allready).

This is not an easy task, of course, because it involves a lot of analysing
the needs of an educational organisation as well as reviewing how the
organisation works, how the students preceivethe service the receive, etc,
etc. In other words, a lot of process development, instead of "technical"
development.

I am currently heavily involved in such a project. Among other things, I'd
like to have a serious discussion on the pros and cons of building such a
site/portal/whatever with Zope and why it is better to choose Zope, instead
of, say, Turbine in a combination with Jetspeed, which much more "buzzword"
(read Java) compliant.

The recent instabilities and slow response times experienced with the
zope.org site and the incomplete, possibly unstable, state of DCOracle, the
Oracle adapter (and similar concerns with some other needed Zope Products)
has been raising some questions of the suitability of Zope for this kind of
project.

On the other hand, I fail to see an alternative to Zope; of course there are
better CMS'es, better development platforms, better Oracle support
elsewhere, and so on,  but neither of those systems has the combination of
integrated features and modularity of Zope.

I am very interested in talking, even building a Zope SIG, with more people
that interested in these issues. The traffic on the main Zope list is too
heavy, and I feel this issue is better of maintained in a parallel list. I
also would like to know if there is interest from Digital Creations in this
matter.

What do you people think? Feed(back) me! :)

Sincerely,

/dario

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Dario Lopez-Kästen     Systems Developer  Chalmers Univ. of Technology
dario@ita.chalmers.se  ICQ will yield no hits    IT Systems & Services