[Zope] Help! The suits are taking away my Zope!

[Dunigan, Craig]

I read the recent thread about the so-called WebDAV support in Office2K, and
it raised some hope that someone may be able to help me.  I am about to have
my Zope intranet yanked out from under me, tentatively to be replaced by, of
all things, MS SharePoint Server.  I have a new "Corporate VP of MIS," who
truly believes the whole "increased productivity" myth that MS propounds.
Anyway, here's my situation.  I have a central ZEO server and four remote
ZEO clients.  The ZEO clients function as each remote location's "local"
intranet server, by caching most of the content, and requesting new objects
when notified by the ZEO server that an object has been updated.  Each site
connects back to the ZEO server by VPN.  Oh, and as of today, the remote
servers are Zope 2.3, ZEO 1.0b3, and Linux, and the central ZEO server is
Zope 2.3, ZEO 1.0b3, and NT4SP6 (*not* my idea!).  It works great, giving us
near real-time file sharing.  But, my users have two complaints that I can't
resolve.  

One, you can't use Office2K for collaborative editing of a document.  Now,
*we* know that's because Microsoft didn't do WebDAV right.  But the suits'
perception is "it works with SharePoint, so something must be wrong with
Zope."  I have no doubts that this is exactly the reaction that MS planned
for.  Is there any way to make Zope work with the bastardized MS
implementation of WebDAV?  

Their second complaint is that users can't attach a Zope-served document to
an email from within MS Outlook.  I've tried everything I can think of, but
Outlook appears to be brain-damaged.  It seems to me that it can only
understand "drive letters," not even the so-called WebDAV Folders that MS
uses.  By "drive letters," it seems to mean UNC mapped SMB shares.  Has
anyone done any work with making the ZODB speak SMB?  I'd really like to
stay with the ZODB for storage, because the way ZEO works is one of my
biggest selling points for Zope.  If I have to go to FileStorage to use
Samba, and arrange for scheduled replication over the VPN, I'd be in no
better shape than SharePoint, and we'd lose that near real-time thing that
everyone seems to love.  So, can anyone tell me how to get Zope to serve
something that Outlook can understand?

Craig Dunigan
Web Programmer
Esker Software
608.273.6000