[Zope] online collaboration tool

[Alex Coventry]

> My company is using eroom, they spent lot of money every month paying
> this tool, eroom is an online collaboration tool, I know that can be
> done with Zope, I am just starting using Zope, I Love it... the fact
> is that they want to get rid of it and me, I need some good argument
> for not loosing my job... I think if I can convince then of letting me
> developed a Zope version of eroom that would keep me safe here for a
> while.

I used plone for just this purpose, getting rid of e-room. (except the
keeping-my-job part. :) I suggest you discuss it with your boss before
you start on it, though.  It's easy once you know how, but it was a bit
of work for me.  It may take you more than longer than an empty
afternoon.

I have found it relatively painless once it was going, though.  OTOH, I
recommended it to a friend, and he has found it to be a pain in the
neck.  YMMV.

I strongly recommend installing and using TextIndexNG, as well as
plone's explicit dependancies.  This allows indexing of word documents,
PDFs, etc.  You do this by replacing the SearchableText object in the
Indexes section of the portal_catalog with a TextIndexNG object.  You
want to turn on the "use converters" option when you install it.  Then
you click the "Reindex" button in the Indexes page.

You may also want to play with the workflow, depending on how you want
to use it for collaboration.  One way to do this is to make Published
the Initial State in the States tab of the workflow tabs.

I also stuck my Zope web and webDAV services behind Apache SSL
proxies.  For  that, a Virtual Host Monster is useful.

HTH.
Alex.