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Zope question: collaborative environments?

Mats Wichmann xyzmats at laplaza.org
Fri Oct 27 14:36:33 EDT 2000 
On Thu, 26 Oct 2000 20:14:36 -0400, Tom Bryan <TBryan at UTS.Itron.com>
wrote:

>I plan to search more in the Zope archives and maybe discuss this question 
>on one of their myriad of mailing lists or discussion boards, but I was 
>hoping that someone might have a quick answer.
>
>I'm a developer, and I'd like to create a combination discussion board, 
>bug tracking system, and general collaborative environment.  I was 
>thinking of using Zope, but I have never even looked at Zope.  Am I crazy 
>even to consider using Zope when we won't have any dedicated staff to 
>develop stuff for/in Zope and maintain it?  Is Zope easy enough to use, 
>simple enough to maintain, and complete enough as a product that I could 
>get something set up with just a couple of weeks of work and then simply 
>use it?
>
>Any advice before I waste a lot of time digging into this topic would be 
>much appreciated.  (The time frame is very tight.  My boss is planning to 
>lend me one of his personal machines to play put on my network at home as 
>a zope or sourceforge or ??? server so that I can evaluate it next week.
>He definitely wants something in place in the next few weeks.)

I won't really comment on Zope, you've gotten plenty of responses
already.  Given unrealistic deadlines, I think you need to go into
"what will be good enough" mode.

If you're really pressed for time look for solutions that require
minimal implementation effort. I used  Perforce plus a mailing list
manager to handle a moderate sized project where I got brought in late
as a consultant to put it together (don't ask: there was a chain of
parties involved and there was a contract squabble with a supplier -
they wouldn't bring me in until it was solved. I maybe should have
said no...but we delivered on time anyway). We really didn't have time
to "build" anything at all.  Perforce with a couple of Python scripts
did what we needed and didn't take up a lot of time getting in the
way. I was pretty happy with how that worked out.  (Also have a fond
memory of this since it's what brought me into Python in the first
place). Took me less than a day to set it all up.

If you're in this for a longer haul, something like the above might be
your "do one to throw away" so you get a feel for what works and what
doesn't - this is a hard job to get right.  I've seen companies work
for years to try to get their collaborative environments just right -
and of course they never were.  (Note: Perforce repositories are CVS
code-compatible so you can get out of it if you need to.)

Long-term, I'm looking for what you're looking for...and so are many
others. Keep us up to date!

Mats Wichmann

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