Re: Plone NGO Mailing List Christian Aid go for Microsoft over Open Source

[rgregory]

Hi,

I think the article is a little misleading. If you listen to the full
Podcast the main argument is about open source on the desktop not for
applications. The main application they talk about is Sharepoint - for use
in internal collaboration - not as a CMS for web publishing.

I do think Sharepoint will become a major player in this niche for NGOs as
it will be shipped as part of Windows 2007.  One of the major advantages it
has (amoung many failings!) is that over time it will be integrated with
Groove.  This will enable it to support both online and off line working.
This is a major issue for NGOs such as Oxfam and Christian Aid where we
have many staff working in situations where there is minimal communications
infrastructure.

 Are there any plans for Plone to support mobile/off line working?

Romilly



                                                                                                                                       
                      "michael nt                                                                                                      
                      milne"                   To:       "A list for NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) using Plone."              
                      <michael.milne@gm         <[hidden email]>                                                                  
                      ail.com>                 cc:                                                                                    
                      Sent by:                 Subject:  Re: Plone NGO Mailing List Christian Aid go for Microsoft over Open          
                      ngo-bounces@lists         Source                                                                                
                      .plone.org                                                                                                      
                                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                                                       
                      11/11/2006 11:18                                                                                                
                      Please respond to                                                                                                
                      "A list for NGOs                                                                                                
                      \(Non-Governmenta                                                                                                
                      l Organizations\)                                                                                                
                      using Plone."                                                                                                    
                       :13 Kb                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                                                       




I think most people realise that open source isn't free and includes set-up
and support costs. Still it still works out much cheaper that going with
licenses. There's a big difference between using open source as a desktop
in an organisation and using it as a web application etc. That point isn't
highlighted in the article. Most NGOs that I know are using Windows as
their desktop. Also the comment about having their systems open so that
anybody can see what they're doing. That's wrong. Yes the difference
between code and data etc.

Can't imagine they're getting a good CMS through Microsoft compared to the
value and innovation that the open source community could provide.


On 11/11/06, Alexander Limi <[hidden email]> wrote:
      On Thu, 09 Nov 2006 14:29:21 -0800, Zahid Malik
      <[hidden email]> wrote:

      > Sorry if this is slightly off-topic but I though it was an
      interesting
      > piece ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6124582.stm) on
      Christian
      > Aid's arguments for using Microsoft over Open Source. Some of these
      > are relevant to Plone's entry into NGO's. You can see what slashdot
      > thought of it all
      > (http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/06/11/09/152257.shtml).

      This is a pretty uninformed article, and as mentioned on Slashdot,
      the
      people don't seem to understand the difference between code and data.

      I have actually spoken to these people a while back about using open
      source (if I'm not mixing up people here) — and Plone — and I won't
      say
      more than that I'm not surprised that they ended up going with
      Microsoft.

      --
      _____________________________________________________________________

            Alexander Limi · Chief Architect · Plone Solutions · Norway

        Consulting · Training · Development · http://www.plonesolutions.com
      _____________________________________________________________________

             Plone Co-Founder · http://plone.org · Connecting Content
         Plone Foundation · http://plone.org/foundation · Protecting Plone



      _______________________________________________
      NGO mailing list
      [hidden email]
      http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo



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Oxfam works with others to overcome poverty and suffering.

Oxfam GB is a member of Oxfam International, a company limited by guarantee and registered in England No. 612172. 
Registered office: Oxfam House, John Smith Drive, Cowley, Oxford, OX4 2JY
Registered charity No. 202918.

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[Matt Lee-6]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 03:17:27PM +0000, [hidden email] wrote:

> I do think Sharepoint will become a major player in this niche for NGOs as
> it will be shipped as part of Windows 2007.  One of the major advantages it
> has (amoung many failings!) is that over time it will be integrated with
> Groove.  This will enable it to support both online and off line working.
> This is a major issue for NGOs such as Oxfam and Christian Aid where we
> have many staff working in situations where there is minimal communications
> infrastructure.

I find it a shame that so many of the non-profit organisations that
aim to empower people and offer them greater freedom, feel the need to
rely on proprietary software in such a great way. I would have hoped
that they would in fact be taking a lead in ensuring that their ways
of working were not locked up in proprietary systems, such as
Sharepoint and Groove. Maybe this will change in 2007, now that
systems built upon Java can be truly free software.

Although it may not be elegant, email is still a very good way to
allow you to work offline, and as they say, if it isn't broken, don't
fix it :)

matt

--
Matt Lee
Chief Webmaster, GNU Project - http://www.gnu.org/ - Free as in Freedom
Free Software Foundation - Free Software, Free Society - http://www.fsf.org/

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[Peter Hollands]

On Wednesday 15 November 2006 16:11, Matt Lee wrote:
> Although it may not be elegant, email is still a very good way to
> allow you to work offline, and as they say, if it isn't broken, don't
> fix it

But I think the point is that email is  broken - in the sense that it is a
poor tool from the point of view of collaboration within an  enterprise.

For example, Data stored on personal drives - with no attempt to show version
history (wiki) or enterprise searchable taking into account authorisation.
Sole use of email usually  means a dramatic loss institutional memory - which
for most NGOs with high attrition rates (short term volunteers, 2 year
assignments)  is an issue to address.

The right answer to the online / offline architecture is to invest resources
into getting everyone online and to design our systems for the online world.

Offline is a decaying market.

:-)

Peter

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[michael nt milne]

"Sole use of email usually  means a dramatic loss institutional memory"

Absolutely spot on. Knowledge management is key and is lost in email systems. Most knowledge is held within people and is not transferred if email systems are the main collaborative tool. It's too personal.

On 11/15/06, Peter Hollands <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Wednesday 15 November 2006 16:11, Matt Lee wrote:
> Although it may not be elegant, email is still a very good way to
> allow you to work offline, and as they say, if it isn't broken, don't
> fix it

But I think the point is that email is  broken - in the sense that it is a
poor tool from the point of view of collaboration within an  enterprise.

For example, Data stored on personal drives - with no attempt to show version
history (wiki) or enterprise searchable taking into account authorisation.
Sole use of email usually  means a dramatic loss institutional memory - which
for most NGOs with high attrition rates (short term volunteers, 2 year
assignments)  is an issue to address.

The right answer to the online / offline architecture is to invest resources
into getting everyone online and to design our systems for the online world.

Offline is a decaying market.

:-)

Peter

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[Matt Lee-6]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 06:42:26PM +0000, Peter Hollands wrote:

> But I think the point is that email is  broken - in the sense that it is a
> poor tool from the point of view of collaboration within an  enterprise.

Email is used badly. Most people can't even send email properly!

There's no reason why a decent IMAP set up couldn't offer versioning,
for example.

--
Matt Lee
Chief Webmaster, GNU Project - http://www.gnu.org/ - Free as in Freedom
Free Software Foundation - Free Software, Free Society - http://www.fsf.org/


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[Andy McKay-3]

Unfortunately offline is here to stay for quite a long time, and for  
organisations that go into places with poor internet connectivity a  
common problem that isn't going to get solved soon. Gosh I have  
problems getting online in the north of england :)

The moving of data on and offline is relatively straightfoward and a  
known problem. You have to snyc the content up and down at some  
point, lock it and so on. That's all doable, but I don't know of  
anyone working on that in Plone. If anyone is, let me know.

One of the big problems is that you lose a huge amount of  
functionality when you take people out of Plone. You can't have  
people running local Plone's in most situations. So to edit a peice  
of content, I couldn't use say Kupu... so instead people rely on rich  
editors and before we know it everyone's using Word and we have  
another problem.

This is compounded by complex, structured content types. At it's  
simplest, how do you edit a Plone event offline? iCal or Outlook?  
They will load files and then save them internally, so you can't  
really use those. You either have to limit it down "we'll only edit  
Word or HTML documents", find standard rich editors (eg Word or XML  
editor) or use some made up syntax (eg ExternalEditor and the way it  
adds metadata).
--
   Andy McKay



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[Andrew Burkhalter]

On Nov 15, 2006, at 12:27 PM, Andy McKay wrote:

> The moving of data on and offline is relatively straightfoward and  
> a known problem. You have to snyc the content up and down at some  
> point, lock it and so on. That's all doable, but I don't know of  
> anyone working on that in Plone. If anyone is, let me know.

I noticed that offline editing was to be one of the proposed topics  
at the Törggelen sprint.  Not sure what the outcomes were and the  
topic-specific notes are a bit sparse.

http://plone.org/events/sprints/toerggelen/
http://plone.org/events/sprints/toerggelen/sprint-topics

Andrew
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[Sisi Nutt]

Andy McKay wrote:
> Unfortunately offline is here to stay for quite a long time, and for
> organisations that go into places with poor internet connectivity a
> common problem that isn't going to get solved soon. Gosh I have problems
> getting online in the north of england :)

+1
Poor internet connectivity is not just to do with the technology
available but largely to do with a country's communications
infrastructure and political situation.

Many of us on this list either work in or with organisations in
countries where water or electricity aren't taken for granted, never
mind internet connectivity.

My preference is to integrate email lists. People tend to want to use
the tools they are used to, and email is so institutional now. It's the
way most people communicate electronically, it allows easy access when
on a dial up connection and most people have an email address for
communicating with friends, family, and other work contacts. And it's
cross platform. So why would we make them access yet another tool in
order to collaborate? At any rate, in my organisation people are very
resistant to moving away from email as a way of collaboration and
communication. Very.

But, as Peter pointed out "Sole use of email usually  means a dramatic
loss institutional memory" Yup! Couldn't agree more.

So if we can integrate email lists into plone, I think we'd have a good
collaboration tool. I'm personally pinning my hopes on Listen. I know
this does not work so well with collaborating on documents but in my
experience people want to stick with word documents, track changes and
email. That's what they want because it's also what they know, and it's
easy.

If there is any chance of designing an online/ offline solution that
makes sense for people I'm very interested in supporting it. After all,
people flocked to skype and instant messaging. These tools can be
intrusive and entail people being constantly online, but they were easy
enough for people to adopt without a steep learning curve.

For the time being, did I mention Listen yet? :-)

Cheers,
sisi

--
# sisi nutt # extranet coordinator
# Friends of the Earth International
# PO Box 19199 # 1000 GD Amsterdam # The Netherlands
# Tel [phone]  # Fax [phone]  # http://www.foei.org
# email [hidden email] # skype foei_sisi

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[michael nt milne]

"My preference is to integrate email lists."

Yes, but you're getting into Customer Relationship Managment and Plone is not a CRM tool and it's best if it never becomes or tries to be one. Most CRM tools allow Outlook integration and it's best if that is kept there I feel.

I'm not sure if MailBoxer is a solid solution from some comments on the Zope list. Doesn't it use the ZODB for storing all the email etc?

On 11/16/06, sisi <[hidden email]> wrote:

Andy McKay wrote:
> Unfortunately offline is here to stay for quite a long time, and for
> organisations that go into places with poor internet connectivity a
> common problem that isn't going to get solved soon. Gosh I have problems
> getting online in the north of england :)

+1
Poor internet connectivity is not just to do with the technology
available but largely to do with a country's communications
infrastructure and political situation.

Many of us on this list either work in or with organisations in
countries where water or electricity aren't taken for granted, never
mind internet connectivity.

My preference is to integrate email lists. People tend to want to use
the tools they are used to, and email is so institutional now. It's the
way most people communicate electronically, it allows easy access when
on a dial up connection and most people have an email address for
communicating with friends, family, and other work contacts. And it's
cross platform. So why would we make them access yet another tool in
order to collaborate? At any rate, in my organisation people are very
resistant to moving away from email as a way of collaboration and
communication. Very.

But, as Peter pointed out "Sole use of email usually  means a dramatic
loss institutional memory" Yup! Couldn't agree more.

So if we can integrate email lists into plone, I think we'd have a good
collaboration tool. I'm personally pinning my hopes on Listen. I know
this does not work so well with collaborating on documents but in my
experience people want to stick with word documents, track changes and
email. That's what they want because it's also what they know, and it's
easy.

If there is any chance of designing an online/ offline solution that
makes sense for people I'm very interested in supporting it. After all,
people flocked to skype and instant messaging. These tools can be
intrusive and entail people being constantly online, but they were easy
enough for people to adopt without a steep learning curve.

For the time being, did I mention Listen yet? :-)

Cheers,
sisi

--
# sisi nutt # extranet coordinator
# Friends of the Earth International
# PO Box 19199 # 1000 GD Amsterdam # The Netherlands
# Tel [phone]  # Fax [phone]  # http://www.foei.org
# email [hidden email] # skype foei_sisi

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[Sisi Nutt]

michael nt milne wrote:
> "My preference is to integrate email lists."
>
> Yes, but you're getting into Customer Relationship Managment and Plone
> is not a CRM tool and it's best if it never becomes or tries to be one.
> Most CRM tools allow Outlook integration and it's best if that is kept
> there I feel.

I don't want to interface with everyones mobile phones, faxes and credit
card details, just their emails :-)

And the point is, I still need such a tool, so if it can be created
within plone that would make me very happy.

Also, a scaled down CRM seems to me very like the kind of tools that are
being developed by people in the plone community to handle the
information of volunteers and supporters, mostly in combination with
ldap. So this sounds like semantics to me. I don't want the
functionality of most of a CRM tool, just one part of what they do
(though I wouldn't say integration with outlook was functional...)

If I have the wrong end of the technical stick please set me right!

> I'm not sure if MailBoxer is a solid solution from some comments on the
> Zope list. Doesn't it use the ZODB for storing all the email etc?

I don't know I'm afraid. I'm backing the concept more than the technical
details at this stage. I hope someone who is developing listen can
answer this, I think they are on the list.

Cheers,
sisi

> On 11/16/06, * sisi* <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     Andy McKay wrote:
>     > Unfortunately offline is here to stay for quite a long time, and for
>     > organisations that go into places with poor internet connectivity a
>     > common problem that isn't going to get solved soon. Gosh I have
>     problems
>     > getting online in the north of england :)
>
>     +1
>     Poor internet connectivity is not just to do with the technology
>     available but largely to do with a country's communications
>     infrastructure and political situation.
>
>     Many of us on this list either work in or with organisations in
>     countries where water or electricity aren't taken for granted, never
>     mind internet connectivity.
>
>     My preference is to integrate email lists. People tend to want to use
>     the tools they are used to, and email is so institutional now. It's the
>     way most people communicate electronically, it allows easy access when
>     on a dial up connection and most people have an email address for
>     communicating with friends, family, and other work contacts. And it's
>     cross platform. So why would we make them access yet another tool in
>     order to collaborate? At any rate, in my organisation people are very
>     resistant to moving away from email as a way of collaboration and
>     communication. Very.
>
>     But, as Peter pointed out "Sole use of email usually  means a dramatic
>     loss institutional memory" Yup! Couldn't agree more.
>
>     So if we can integrate email lists into plone, I think we'd have a good
>     collaboration tool. I'm personally pinning my hopes on Listen. I know
>     this does not work so well with collaborating on documents but in my
>     experience people want to stick with word documents, track changes and
>     email. That's what they want because it's also what they know, and it's
>     easy.
>
>     If there is any chance of designing an online/ offline solution that
>     makes sense for people I'm very interested in supporting it. After all,
>     people flocked to skype and instant messaging. These tools can be
>     intrusive and entail people being constantly online, but they were easy
>     enough for people to adopt without a steep learning curve.
>
>     For the time being, did I mention Listen yet? :-)
>
>     Cheers,
>     sisi
>
>     --
>     # sisi nutt # extranet coordinator
>     # Friends of the Earth International
>     # PO Box 19199 # 1000 GD Amsterdam # The Netherlands
>     # Tel [phone]  # Fax [phone]  # http://www.foei.org
>     # email [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]> # skype foei_sisi
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     NGO mailing list
>     [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>
>     http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
>
>
>
>
> --
> michael
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> NGO mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

--
# sisi nutt # extranet coordinator
# Friends of the Earth International
# PO Box 19199 # 1000 GD Amsterdam # The Netherlands
# Tel [phone]  # Fax [phone]  # http://www.foei.org
# email [hidden email] # skype foei_sisi

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[michael nt milne]

Yes, I see what you're saying. Plone does have scaled down CRM type tools and that's useful. Just that full email integration is very tricky and often involves a lot of data. I don't think Plone does email very well at the moment and am not sure if it is a priority. Probably not. I understand what you're trying to do though. Have you thought about using Plone together with something like Salesforce as well. It integrates with email and also speaks to Plone. You've got power on both sides then. Salesforce Enterprise is free for NGOs as well. Works with Plone 2.5. Member objects, contact info in Plone are available to Salesforce and Salesforce data is available to Plone.

On 11/16/06, sisi <[hidden email]> wrote:

michael nt milne wrote:
> "My preference is to integrate email lists."
>
> Yes, but you're getting into Customer Relationship Managment and Plone
> is not a CRM tool and it's best if it never becomes or tries to be one.
> Most CRM tools allow Outlook integration and it's best if that is kept
> there I feel.

I don't want to interface with everyones mobile phones, faxes and credit
card details, just their emails :-)

And the point is, I still need such a tool, so if it can be created
within plone that would make me very happy.

Also, a scaled down CRM seems to me very like the kind of tools that are
being developed by people in the plone community to handle the
information of volunteers and supporters, mostly in combination with
ldap. So this sounds like semantics to me. I don't want the
functionality of most of a CRM tool, just one part of what they do
(though I wouldn't say integration with outlook was functional...)

If I have the wrong end of the technical stick please set me right!

> I'm not sure if MailBoxer is a solid solution from some comments on the
> Zope list. Doesn't it use the ZODB for storing all the email etc?

I don't know I'm afraid. I'm backing the concept more than the technical
details at this stage. I hope someone who is developing listen can
answer this, I think they are on the list.

Cheers,
sisi

> On 11/16/06, * sisi* <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     Andy McKay wrote:
>     > Unfortunately offline is here to stay for quite a long time, and for
>     > organisations that go into places with poor internet connectivity a

>     > common problem that isn't going to get solved soon. Gosh I have
>     problems
>     > getting online in the north of england :)
>
>     +1
>     Poor internet connectivity is not just to do with the technology
>     available but largely to do with a country's communications
>     infrastructure and political situation.
>
>     Many of us on this list either work in or with organisations in
>     countries where water or electricity aren't taken for granted, never
>     mind internet connectivity.
>
>     My preference is to integrate email lists. People tend to want to use
>     the tools they are used to, and email is so institutional now. It's the
>     way most people communicate electronically, it allows easy access when
>     on a dial up connection and most people have an email address for
>     communicating with friends, family, and other work contacts. And it's
>     cross platform. So why would we make them access yet another tool in
>     order to collaborate? At any rate, in my organisation people are very
>     resistant to moving away from email as a way of collaboration and
>     communication. Very.
>
>     But, as Peter pointed out "Sole use of email usually  means a dramatic
>     loss institutional memory" Yup! Couldn't agree more.
>
>     So if we can integrate email lists into plone, I think we'd have a good
>     collaboration tool. I'm personally pinning my hopes on Listen. I know
>     this does not work so well with collaborating on documents but in my
>     experience people want to stick with word documents, track changes and
>     email. That's what they want because it's also what they know, and it's
>     easy.
>
>     If there is any chance of designing an online/ offline solution that
>     makes sense for people I'm very interested in supporting it. After all,
>     people flocked to skype and instant messaging. These tools can be
>     intrusive and entail people being constantly online, but they were easy
>     enough for people to adopt without a steep learning curve.
>
>     For the time being, did I mention Listen yet? :-)
>
>     Cheers,
>     sisi
>
>     --
>     # sisi nutt # extranet coordinator
>     # Friends of the Earth International
>     # PO Box 19199 # 1000 GD Amsterdam # The Netherlands
>     # Tel [phone]  # Fax [phone]  # http://www.foei.org
>     # email [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]> # skype foei_sisi
>
>     _______________________________________________

>     NGO mailing list

>     [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>
>     http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
>
>
>
>
> --
> michael
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> NGO mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

--
# sisi nutt # extranet coordinator
# Friends of the Earth International
# PO Box 19199 # 1000 GD Amsterdam # The Netherlands
# Tel [phone]  # Fax [phone]  # http://www.foei.org
# email [hidden email] # skype foei_sisi

_______________________________________________
NGO mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

--
michael
_______________________________________________
NGO mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

[Sisi Nutt]

Salesforce might be a little over kill for our needs but it sounds
really interesting so I will look in to it. Thanks for the tip :-)

I understand now what you are saying about plone handling email. My
colleague Paul from Friends of the Earth Netherlands has just explained
the technical details of why trying to handle a mailing list with 1000
plus people with plone is a bad idea.

I believe there are the beginnings of plans afoot to integrate current
mailing list software with plone, letting plone do the nice user
interface stuff and storing and processing the data elsewhere.

Listen is a great concept so I hope there is a way to make it more
robust, or at least scale. Or use some of the concepts of listen to make
a more robust product (for mailing lists processing 5000 email addresses
etc)

Cheers,
sisi


michael nt milne wrote:

> Yes, I see what you're saying. Plone does have scaled down CRM type
> tools and that's useful. Just that full email integration is very tricky
> and often involves a lot of data. I don't think Plone does email very
> well at the moment and am not sure if it is a priority. Probably not. I
> understand what you're trying to do though. Have you thought about using
> Plone together with something like Salesforce as well. It integrates
> with email and also speaks to Plone. You've got power on both sides
> then. Salesforce Enterprise is free for NGOs as well. Works with Plone
> 2.5. Member objects, contact info in Plone are available to Salesforce
> and Salesforce data is available to Plone.
>
> On 11/16/06, *sisi* < [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     michael nt milne wrote:
>     > "My preference is to integrate email lists."
>     >
>     > Yes, but you're getting into Customer Relationship Managment and Plone
>     > is not a CRM tool and it's best if it never becomes or tries to be
>     one.
>     > Most CRM tools allow Outlook integration and it's best if that is
>     kept
>     > there I feel.
>
>     I don't want to interface with everyones mobile phones, faxes and credit
>     card details, just their emails :-)
>
>     And the point is, I still need such a tool, so if it can be created
>     within plone that would make me very happy.
>
>     Also, a scaled down CRM seems to me very like the kind of tools that are
>     being developed by people in the plone community to handle the
>     information of volunteers and supporters, mostly in combination with
>     ldap. So this sounds like semantics to me. I don't want the
>     functionality of most of a CRM tool, just one part of what they do
>     (though I wouldn't say integration with outlook was functional...)
>
>     If I have the wrong end of the technical stick please set me right!
>
>     > I'm not sure if MailBoxer is a solid solution from some comments
>     on the
>     > Zope list. Doesn't it use the ZODB for storing all the email etc?
>
>     I don't know I'm afraid. I'm backing the concept more than the
>     technical
>     details at this stage. I hope someone who is developing listen can
>     answer this, I think they are on the list.
>
>     Cheers,
>     sisi
>
>     > On 11/16/06, * sisi* <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>
>     <mailto:[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>>> wrote:
>     >
>     >
>     >
>     >     Andy McKay wrote:
>     >     > Unfortunately offline is here to stay for quite a long time,
>     and for
>     >     > organisations that go into places with poor internet
>     connectivity a
>     >     > common problem that isn't going to get solved soon. Gosh I have
>     >     problems
>     >     > getting online in the north of england :)
>     >
>     >     +1
>     >     Poor internet connectivity is not just to do with the technology
>     >     available but largely to do with a country's communications
>     >     infrastructure and political situation.
>     >
>     >     Many of us on this list either work in or with organisations in
>     >     countries where water or electricity aren't taken for granted,
>     never
>     >     mind internet connectivity.
>     >
>     >     My preference is to integrate email lists. People tend to want
>     to use
>     >     the tools they are used to, and email is so institutional now.
>     It's the
>     >     way most people communicate electronically, it allows easy
>     access when
>     >     on a dial up connection and most people have an email address for
>     >     communicating with friends, family, and other work contacts.
>     And it's
>     >     cross platform. So why would we make them access yet another
>     tool in
>     >     order to collaborate? At any rate, in my organisation people
>     are very
>     >     resistant to moving away from email as a way of collaboration and
>     >     communication. Very.
>     >
>     >     But, as Peter pointed out "Sole use of email usually  means a
>     dramatic
>     >     loss institutional memory" Yup! Couldn't agree more.
>     >
>     >     So if we can integrate email lists into plone, I think we'd
>     have a good
>     >     collaboration tool. I'm personally pinning my hopes on Listen.
>     I know
>     >     this does not work so well with collaborating on documents but
>     in my
>     >     experience people want to stick with word documents, track
>     changes and
>     >     email. That's what they want because it's also what they know,
>     and it's
>     >     easy.
>     >
>     >     If there is any chance of designing an online/ offline
>     solution that
>     >     makes sense for people I'm very interested in supporting it.
>     After all,
>     >     people flocked to skype and instant messaging. These tools can be
>     >     intrusive and entail people being constantly online, but they
>     were easy
>     >     enough for people to adopt without a steep learning curve.
>     >
>     >     For the time being, did I mention Listen yet? :-)
>     >
>     >     Cheers,
>     >     sisi
>     >
>     >     --
>     >     # sisi nutt # extranet coordinator
>     >     # Friends of the Earth International
>     >     # PO Box 19199 # 1000 GD Amsterdam # The Netherlands
>     >     # Tel [phone]  # Fax [phone]  # http://www.foei.org
>     >     # email [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>
>     <mailto:[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> # skype foei_sisi
>     >
>     >     _______________________________________________
>     >     NGO mailing list
>     >     [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>
>     <mailto:[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>>
>     >     http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
>     >
>     >
>     >
>     >
>     > --
>     > michael
>     >
>     >
>     >
>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>     >
>     > _______________________________________________
>     > NGO mailing list
>     > [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>
>     > http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
>
>     --
>     # sisi nutt # extranet coordinator
>     # Friends of the Earth International
>     # PO Box 19199 # 1000 GD Amsterdam # The Netherlands
>     # Tel [phone]  # Fax [phone]  # http://www.foei.org
>     # email [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]> # skype foei_sisi
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     NGO mailing list
>     [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>
>     http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
>
>
>
>
> --
> michael
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> NGO mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

--
# sisi nutt # extranet coordinator
# Friends of the Earth International
# PO Box 19199 # 1000 GD Amsterdam # The Netherlands
# Tel [phone]  # Fax [phone]  # http://www.foei.org
# email [hidden email] # skype foei_sisi

_______________________________________________
NGO mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

[Jon Stahl]

> I believe there are the beginnings of plans afoot to
> integrate current mailing list software with plone, letting
> plone do the nice user interface stuff and storing and
> processing the data elsewhere.

Indeed.  Hugh Ranalli from Toronto was scheming with folks in Seattle to
connect Plone up to Sympa (http://www.sympa.org), a powerful, scalable,
proven email discussion list engine (written in Perl, but don't hold
that against it, too much!) that has a pretty decent SOAP API and a
strong community.  I would love to see that move forward.  Plone would
be a great front-end for Sympa, which really does a good job with the
(surprisingly complex) mechanics of large email discussion lists.  

> Listen is a great concept so I hope there is a way to make it
> more robust, or at least scale. Or use some of the concepts
> of listen to make a more robust product (for mailing lists
> processing 5000 email addresses
> etc)

Alec is indeed doing some great work here. I think scalability is likely
to remain a challenge, but who knows, the Plone wizards have pulled
tricks out of their hats before.

best,
jon

_______________________________________________
NGO mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

[Alexander Limi]

On Wed, 15 Nov 2006 07:17:27 -0800,  
<[hidden email]> wrote:

>  Are there any plans for Plone to support mobile/off line working?

This is indeed something we'd like to support — and as other people here  
note, it would have to be with something similar to a replication strategy  
that synced back and forth and handled conflicts (if any).

Ideally, you should be able to run Plone on a laptop, select an area of  
the site that you want to "take home", and perform edits on it and sync  
back later. This would assume that you have the same products installed on  
your laptop, but should be doable. Most Plone content is easily diffable  
and mergable, seeing as it's HTML-centric.

Unfortunately, this is not a trivial undertaking, and until a couple of  
companies/organizations pool together on getting something like this  
built, I doubt it will be done.

We were discussing this a while back under the moniker "Mobile Plone", and  
I believe Paul (Everitt) has some interesting ideas on it too. It's always  
been one of the things that everybody wants, but nobody has a big enough  
need for to actually start developing seriously.

I do believe that there are many more NGOs that would be interested in  
something like this now than when we last discussed it, so it should be  
possible now if the resources are there.

--
_____________________________________________________________________

      Alexander Limi · Chief Architect · Plone Solutions · Norway

  Consulting · Training · Development · http://www.plonesolutions.com
_____________________________________________________________________

       Plone Co-Founder · http://plone.org · Connecting Content
   Plone Foundation · http://plone.org/foundation · Protecting Plone
 


_______________________________________________
NGO mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

[Russ Ferriday]

Some javascript/style in this post has been disabled (why?)

[I have sent a copy of this mail to the parties concerned but in a separate message, due to mailing list constraints.]

There was some discussion on this topic, and also some concrete action in a useful direction, at the Bozen/Bolzano sprint last week.

Outcome so far is in the collective as "forest" - Many tests will run, but it is completely unusable for any real business purpose at the moment, and may remain so until we converge on it again.

Use cases were:

  offline plone - researchers going into the field with some empty folders, and 

         merging new content in those folders when they return - This could eventually 

         become bidirectional/universal synch - like Notes

  migration - taking content from 'foreign' CMSs and inserting into Plone

  processing - processing content from one part of a site, and putting into another part of a site (example - expanding STX to HTML)

But that was just scratching the surface. SVN lurked large in the conversation, and the selector/distributor paradigm fits well with the needs of SVN.

We created an architecture defining Source and Target Interfaces. Implementations of these contain implementations of Selector and Distributor, respectively. Selectors and Distributors each possess a collection of channels. A high level controller class puts Source and Target in touch, which allows channels to be negotiated, and an appropriate controller to be instantiated.  Transfer occurs through a converter class that is initially null, but can do any necessary processing/conversion.  The idea is to delegate negotiation of transports, formats, etc, as low as possible.

Jens Klein has refactored part of XMLForest with a goal of reusing it in this new architecture. Robert Niederreiter and Thomas Holleister and I worked on an IMSCP implementation, which is a soon-to-be-iso content format for learning content, which happens to be very suited for export from CMS because it defines Organization elements, which allows multiple 'views' of content linkage (hierarchical, flat, heterachical, etc.). Stefan Eletzhofer and Ramon Bartle

were also involved in quickly and efficiently prototyping the architecture and testing the results.

The initial goal is a lightweight proof-of-concept for export/import to IMSCP. From that point, we would like to make lightweight implementations of other standards, before getting too "hung-up" on one use case. This will give us chance to prove the architecture before making a big commitment in a single direction.

There will be many benefits of converging on this kind of architecture, the main one being that of interoperability of implementations/encapsulations of formats and other CMSs. My first goal is a system that I can point, for example, at and old Cold Fusion site, and suck in the content, deriving hierarchy from parent_ID params in the URL.  Beyond that I want to include various additional features related to multilingual requirements. The use case for offline plone came from Louis Wannijn of the Royal Belgium Institute of Natural Sciences and from Patrick Ohnewein of cocos.bz

I'll be getting back into this later next week once back in UK.  If anyone is interested to be more closely involved, please drop me a line, and I'll get you on the list I/we will shortly set up. This is a topic I will mention at the Brussels meeting on Plone in public organizations, next week.

Finally, a big thank-you to Patrick Ohnewein of cocos.bz, Paolo Gongilli and Konrad ? of the University of Bozen/Bolzano in South Tyrol for providing space, network, and lots of support.

Best,

--r

On 17 Nov 2006, at 09:19, Alexander Limi wrote:

On Wed, 15 Nov 2006 07:17:27 -0800, <[hidden email]> wrote:

 Are there any plans for Plone to support mobile/off line working?

This is indeed something we'd like to support — and as other people here note, it would have to be with something similar to a replication strategy that synced back and forth and handled conflicts (if any).

Ideally, you should be able to run Plone on a laptop, select an area of the site that you want to "take home", and perform edits on it and sync back later. This would assume that you have the same products installed on your laptop, but should be doable. Most Plone content is easily diffable and mergable, seeing as it's HTML-centric.

Unfortunately, this is not a trivial undertaking, and until a couple of companies/organizations pool together on getting something like this built, I doubt it will be done.

We were discussing this a while back under the moniker "Mobile Plone", and I believe Paul (Everitt) has some interesting ideas on it too. It's always been one of the things that everybody wants, but nobody has a big enough need for to actually start developing seriously.

I do believe that there are many more NGOs that would be interested in something like this now than when we last discussed it, so it should be possible now if the resources are there.

-- 

_____________________________________________________________________

     Alexander Limi · Chief Architect · Plone Solutions · Norway

 Consulting · Training · Development · http://www.plonesolutions.com

_____________________________________________________________________

      Plone Co-Founder · http://plone.org · Connecting Content

  Plone Foundation · http://plone.org/foundation · Protecting Plone

_______________________________________________

NGO mailing list

[hidden email]

http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

Russ Ferriday - Topia Systems - multilingual content management
contact: [hidden email] - (+44) (0)2076 1777588 - skype: ferriday

a member of the
evenios group

_______________________________________________
NGO mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

[Curtis M Carlson]

Please Russ, keep me abreast.  This sounds quite interesting and very applicable to where we may be heading in the future...Mobile Plone and all.

Thnx
Curtis


Curtis M Carlson
[hidden email]
502-852-1987
IT / Website Coordinator
----------------
Kentucky Pollution Prevention Center
(KPPC)
420 Lutz Hall
University of Louisville
Louisville KY 40292
1-800-334-8635
===============
"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty, I only think about how to solve the problem.  But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it's wrong."
--Buckminster Fuller--


>>> Russ Ferriday <[hidden email]> 11-17-2006 6:02 AM >>>
[I have sent a copy of this mail to the parties concerned but in a  
separate message, due to mailing list constraints.]

There was some discussion on this topic, and also some concrete  
action in a useful direction, at the Bozen/Bolzano sprint last week.

Outcome so far is in the collective as "forest" - Many tests will  
run, but it is completely unusable for any real business purpose at  
the moment, and may remain so until we converge on it again.

Use cases were:

   offline plone - researchers going into the field with some empty  
folders, and
          merging new content in those folders when they return -  
This could eventually
          become bidirectional/universal synch - like Notes

   migration - taking content from 'foreign' CMSs and inserting into  
Plone

   processing - processing content from one part of a site, and  
putting into another part of a site (example - expanding STX to HTML)

But that was just scratching the surface. SVN lurked large in the  
conversation, and the selector/distributor paradigm fits well with  
the needs of SVN.

We created an architecture defining Source and Target Interfaces.  
Implementations of these contain implementations of Selector and  
Distributor, respectively. Selectors and Distributors each possess a  
collection of channels. A high level controller class puts Source and  
Target in touch, which allows channels to be negotiated, and an  
appropriate controller to be instantiated.  Transfer occurs through a  
converter class that is initially null, but can do any necessary  
processing/conversion.  The idea is to delegate negotiation of  
transports, formats, etc, as low as possible.

Jens Klein has refactored part of XMLForest with a goal of reusing it  
in this new architecture. Robert Niederreiter and Thomas Holleister  
and I worked on an IMSCP implementation, which is a soon-to-be-iso  
content format for learning content, which happens to be very suited  
for export from CMS because it defines Organization elements, which  
allows multiple 'views' of content linkage (hierarchical, flat,  
heterachical, etc.). Stefan Eletzhofer and Ramon Bartle
were also involved in quickly and efficiently prototyping the  
architecture and testing the results.

The initial goal is a lightweight proof-of-concept for export/import  
to IMSCP. From that point, we would like to make lightweight  
implementations of other standards, before getting too "hung-up" on  
one use case. This will give us chance to prove the architecture  
before making a big commitment in a single direction.

There will be many benefits of converging on this kind of  
architecture, the main one being that of interoperability of  
implementations/encapsulations of formats and other CMSs. My first  
goal is a system that I can point, for example, at and old Cold  
Fusion site, and suck in the content, deriving hierarchy from  
parent_ID params in the URL.  Beyond that I want to include various  
additional features related to multilingual requirements. The use  
case for offline plone came from Louis Wannijn of the Royal Belgium  
Institute of Natural Sciences and from Patrick Ohnewein of cocos.bz

I'll be getting back into this later next week once back in UK.  If  
anyone is interested to be more closely involved, please drop me a  
line, and I'll get you on the list I/we will shortly set up. This is  
a topic I will mention at the Brussels meeting on Plone in public  
organizations, next week.

Finally, a big thank-you to Patrick Ohnewein of cocos.bz, Paolo  
Gongilli and Konrad ? of the University of Bozen/Bolzano in South  
Tyrol for providing space, network, and lots of support.

Best,

--r




On 17 Nov 2006, at 09:19, Alexander Limi wrote:

> On Wed, 15 Nov 2006 07:17:27 -0800, <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>>  Are there any plans for Plone to support mobile/off line working?
>
> This is indeed something we'd like to support * and as other people  
> here note, it would have to be with something similar to a  
> replication strategy that synced back and forth and handled  
> conflicts (if any).
>
> Ideally, you should be able to run Plone on a laptop, select an  
> area of the site that you want to "take home", and perform edits on  
> it and sync back later. This would assume that you have the same  
> products installed on your laptop, but should be doable. Most Plone  
> content is easily diffable and mergable, seeing as it's HTML-centric.
>
> Unfortunately, this is not a trivial undertaking, and until a  
> couple of companies/organizations pool together on getting  
> something like this built, I doubt it will be done.
>
> We were discussing this a while back under the moniker "Mobile  
> Plone", and I believe Paul (Everitt) has some interesting ideas on  
> it too. It's always been one of the things that everybody wants,  
> but nobody has a big enough need for to actually start developing  
> seriously.
>
> I do believe that there are many more NGOs that would be interested  
> in something like this now than when we last discussed it, so it  
> should be possible now if the resources are there.
>
> --
> _____________________________________________________________________
>
>      Alexander Limi · Chief Architect · Plone Solutions · Norway
>
>  Consulting · Training · Development · http://www.plonesolutions.com 
> _____________________________________________________________________
>
>       Plone Co-Founder · http://plone.org · Connecting Content
>   Plone Foundation · http://plone.org/foundation · Protecting Plone
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> NGO mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo 

Russ Ferriday - Topia Systems - multilingual content management
contact: [hidden email] - (+44) (0)2076 1777588 - skype: ferriday
a member of the
evenios group


_______________________________________________
NGO mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

[Rob Miller-6]

sisi wrote:
> michael nt milne wrote:

>> I'm not sure if MailBoxer is a solid solution from some comments on the
>> Zope list. Doesn't it use the ZODB for storing all the email etc?
>
> I don't know I'm afraid. I'm backing the concept more than the technical
> details at this stage. I hope someone who is developing listen can
> answer this, I think they are on the list.

MailBoxer does use the ZODB for mail message storage, yes.  and listen, while
actually faster and more scalable than MailBoxer, from our initial testing,
does use MailBoxer, and thus stored the messages in the ZODB.

i was skeptical of this approach myself when we started the listen project,
but alec mitchell, who has written nearly all of the listen code to date, sold
me on the idea.  the ZODB by itself is actually very scalable and very fast in
situations where there's a high read:write ratio; it's quite suitable for
storing a mailing list archive.  the slow-down related to objects in the ZODB
is usually related to the rich behaviour that those objects contain... once
you add CMF / Plone / AT to the mix, things get sloooooow.

alec's solution was to build plone_schemas, which is a package that allows
very thin, Z3-schema driven objects to interact w/ plone in a very minimal
way.  as a result, the mailing list messages are quite lean, and are well
suited to fast, scalable (de)serialization in the ZODB.

alec won me over with his thorough investigation of the various solutions and
options, and i think we've made good choices.  it is our intent to support
listen being able to scale; we hope to eventually have many thousands of
listen-based mailing lists hosted on openplans.org, and hopefully at least a
few of these will likely have many thousands of users.  that being said, we're
working on a lot of software, and while we know that listen needs some
attention, it's not at the top of our priority queue right now.

hope this helps,

-r


_______________________________________________
NGO mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

[Alexander Limi]

On Fri, 17 Nov 2006 12:42:42 -0800, Rob Miller  
<[hidden email]> wrote:

> the ZODB by itself is actually very scalable and very fast in situations  
> where there's a high read:write ratio; it's quite suitable for storing a  
> mailing list archive.  the slow-down related to objects in the ZODB is  
> usually related to the rich behaviour that those objects contain... once  
> you add CMF / Plone / AT to the mix, things get sloooooow.

I just want to second this. The ZODB scales very well, and people have an  
irrational fear of using the ZODB because it doesn't perform well in very  
specific cases like multi-gigabyte binary files etc.

It's AT and all the layers on top that make the the system slow, not the  
ZODB. The ZODB is also the only thing Alan says is never at fault in the  
stack, and the only element he absolutely trusts. Which takes a lot, Alan  
is a cynical, grumpy old man, just like me. ;)

--
_____________________________________________________________________

      Alexander Limi · Chief Architect · Plone Solutions · Norway

  Consulting · Training · Development · http://www.plonesolutions.com
_____________________________________________________________________

       Plone Co-Founder · http://plone.org · Connecting Content
   Plone Foundation · http://plone.org/foundation · Protecting Plone
 


_______________________________________________
NGO mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo

[paul roeland]

(Renaming the thread from the Christian Aid thingie)

Rob Miller wrote:

> MailBoxer does use the ZODB for mail message storage, yes.  and listen,
> while actually faster and more scalable than MailBoxer, from our initial
> testing, does use MailBoxer, and thus stored the messages in the ZODB.
>

<snip for brevity>

> alec won me over with his thorough investigation of the various
> solutions and options, and i think we've made good choices.  it is our
> intent to support listen being able to scale; we hope to eventually have
> many thousands of listen-based mailing lists hosted on openplans.org,
> and hopefully at least a few of these will likely have many thousands of
> users.  that being said, we're working on a lot of software, and while
> we know that listen needs some attention, it's not at the top of our
> priority queue right now.
>

That makes me all the more optimistic that we should get an integration
of Sympa and Plone going, using Listen as the web-archive. I don't doubt
that the ZODB is a good place for a webarchive; I just sincerely doubt
that Zope can/should handle things like bounce management for large
lists. (We regularly send mailings to respondents of web-forms, which
have about a 20-30% bounce rate at the best of time...)

Luckily, in Sympa, web-archives are *completely* separated from the main
mailinglist engine itself. So far separated, in fact, that Sympa keeps
two copies of every message, one for it's own archive and one for it's
web-archive. The web-archive runs as a separate process (WWSympa), which
should be easy to rip out/adapt.
Plus, the newest versions of  Sympa have infrastructure in place whereby
authorisation to it's lists can be 'delegated' to a CMS like Plone. In
other words, it will 'trust' your Plonesite to have authenticated a
user, if it presents the right certificate. That should make it far
easier to allow sending authenticated messages from Plone/Listen.

Thus, it would seem possible to offload all the frightening and boring
stuff of mailinglist management to Sympa (bounce management, load
balancing between SMTP gateways, sending out tons of mail), and do the
human-facing stuff in Plone.
Will try to investigate more.

Paul Roeland
Friends of the Earth Netherlands

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