Geek Summary: Thru some bizarre alignment of the planets, a large 
international client of mine has  rejected a proposal to migrate it's 
web-based ISO documentation to Lotus Notes in favor of my Zope 
alternative even tho a month ago the only option in the running was 
Notes and none of the people who matter had ever heard of Zope. The 
current implementation consists of a large number of M$ Office 
documents being served via NT/IIS4 and maintained with a lot of 
Python. The forthcoming version will still be mostly Office documents 
(please don't point out the obvious- there are some good reasons for 
this) served by windoze2k/Apache, but augmented by Zope and MySQL for 
managerial and other purposes.

But it gets stranger: This good fortune is largely attributable to 
Evil Bill and the passions that M$ arouses. It seems that at the 
corporate level, there was a tussle about whether a proposed 
enterprise resource portal would be based on Lotus Notes or on M$ 
SharePoint- this is still in the "great idea" stage and goes well 
beyond the scope of the ISO documentation intranet site. Since my 
scheme has most of the content remaining in the file system, I was 
able to tell them that it was obviously consistent with a SharePoint 
portal that could otherwise be ignored, while it was by no means 
clear that the Notes solution would allow for this because of some 
security constraints that never made much sense anyway.

The Point: I am recounting this episode to give some encouragement to 
those many of you who daily fend off suggestions that whatever you 
are doing would be a lot better if you would just use some 
proprietary piece of crap in lieu of Zope. Occasionally, you don't 
have to sell Zope so much as make sure that the factions in favor of 
other approaches exhaust themselves fighting with one another, so you 
win by default (especially if you can claim to be M$ tolerant to 
boot). Given the context and history of this situation, it's also 
further proof that Chaos Theory is not just theory.

So now I know that there will be ample Guinness on the table for many 
months to come and I have Zope, Python, and the wonders of corporate 
politics to thank for it.
 

Richard Gordon
--------------------
Gordon Design
Web Design/Database Development
http://www.richardgordon.net

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