[Zope-CMF] CMF for intranets?

Dunigan, Craig craig.dunigan@esker.com
Fri, 29 Jun 2001 09:47:17 -0500


Document management and knowledge sharing are certainly the key issues.  And
yesterday I figured out workflow (I found the CMFDemo product), which will
allow me to make quite a case to several of our departments for
standardizing document production and review.  I'm still mostly new to Zope
(started in December), and CMF is a deep mystery at present.  My major
problem right now is learning a whole new vocabulary.  Unfortunately, like
so many developing products, there seems to be an assumption that everyone
already knows what things like "Dublin Core," or "Syndication," or
"skinnable folders" mean, so I often have to stop dead in the middle of my
investigation to search around and find out.  The CMF online help is full of
these assumptions; for example, from the Syndication help, "The
SyndicationTool allows for sitewide syndication of content in folders (or
folder-like objects which support the synContentValues interface). "  That's
a circular definition if ever I saw one.  I found Dublin Core and skins, but
I *still* don't know just what the heck "syndication" *is*, aside from what
happens to TV sitcoms that get taken off the air.  

I'm interested in using webdav and commercial tools like GoLive or even MS
Office 2000 for my content managers, who would love not to have to learn
anything new, even as straightforward as the CMF "Desktop" interface seems
to be (there's another term I had trouble finding any descriptive
information on!).

I also have an issue that CMF doesn't appear to address, but I could be
wrong.  One of our design requirements is that I must be able to create
lists of document links that can display the original file modification date
of an old Office document, even if it was last modified a year ago, but just
uploaded to zope yesterday.  To accomplish this now, I require that all
files be uploaded with a locally developed xmlrpc client that reads the
local filesystem filedate and writes it to a property of the file created on
Zope, which I can then display when I create the links in DTML.  The problem
is, the client is clunky, slow, and ugly, and I may never get time to clean
it up.  In an ideal world, I could find a way to let content managers use
Office 2000 webdav to write directly to Zope/CMF *and* somehow preserve the
current local file metadata.

Oh well, I've rambled on enough for now.  Time to dig into CMF again and
continue evaluating it.  My decision making "team" has only given me until
the end of the week to come up with a recommendation ....

Craig

> -----Original Message-----
> From: seb bacon [mailto:seb@jamkit.com]
> Sent: Friday, June 29, 2001 3:28 AM
> To: Dunigan, Craig
> Cc: 'John Puster'; 'zope-cmf@zope.org'
> Subject: Re: [Zope-CMF] CMF for intranets?
> 
> 
> It depends on what you want out of an intranet.  I think for document
> management and knowledge-sharing it's great.  For example, I created a
> CMF type based on MSWordDocument, which automatically indexes and
> htmlifies word docs, which is useful in a mixed environment where not
> everyone has word.  I posted a scriptlet a while ago which makes it
> easy to bookmark a webpage on the extranet, which is also useful for
> sharing information.  Combined with metatdata and topics, you end up
> with useful views on your files.  Add webdav and you've got a very
> rich fileserver with a searchable web interface.  the great thing is,
> the cmf does most of these things out of the box - in fact IMO it's
> *more* suited to this kind of thing than website management.
> 
> seb
> 
> * Dunigan, Craig <craig.dunigan@esker.com> [010628 21:12]:
> > Perhaps my reservations are due to lack of knowledge of the 
> product.  It
> > seems to me that it's ideal for creating portals and "news" 
> sites, but
> > things like "Topics" and "News Items" seem only marginally 
> relevant to this
> > task.  Maybe I just don't understand how they're used yet.  
> Since I see that
> > at least two people say they are using it successfully for 
> the same job, I
> > won't give up on it just yet.  But if anyone wants to 
> shorten my learning
> > curve with some examples, I'd be delighted!  
> > 
> > Craig
> > 
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: John Puster [mailto:john.puster@acymtech.com]
> > > Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 2:43 PM
> > > To: 'Dunigan, Craig'; 'zope-cmf@zope.org'
> > > Subject: RE: [Zope-CMF] CMF for intranets?
> > > 
> > > 
> > > I'm currently developing/maintaining my company's intranet 
> > > with CMF (and a
> > > few other non-CMF Zope products).  So far, it's worked 
> very well.  I
> > > probably wouldn't recommend it to a gargantuan company with 
> > > lots of clueless
> > > users, but I think it's perfect for small to medium sized 
> > > companies, and
> > > it's improving every day.
> > > 
> > > What are your reservations in using CMF?
> > > 
> > > -john
> > > 
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: Dunigan, Craig [mailto:craig.dunigan@esker.com]
> > > > Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 2:28 PM
> > > > To: 'zope-cmf@zope.org'
> > > > Subject: [Zope-CMF] CMF for intranets?
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > Can anyone give some advice on the suitability of CMF 
> for a company
> > > > intranet?  I'd been considering giving it a try, but now that 
> > > > I've actually
> > > > taken some time to look at it, I'm not so sure it's right 
> > > for us.  Has
> > > > anyone actually built an intranet with CMF?
> > > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Zope-CMF maillist  -  Zope-CMF@zope.org
> > http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-cmf
> > 
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> reports and feature requests
> 
> -- 
> 
>    [] j a m k i t 
>            
>         seb bacon
> T:  020 7749 7218
> F:  020 7739 8683
> M:  07968 301 336
> W: www.jamkit.com 
>