[Zope] beehive zope hosting (OT?)

[Mark Pratt]

Hello all,

Since their seems to a lot of speculation why we stopped providing Zope
Hosting I'd like to clear some things up and also answer some other
questions brought up during this thread.

In the early days of Zope (when it became Open Source) we fell in love
with the software. We did everything we could to learn how to use it and
spent a lot of time visiting companies who we thought should be using
this software. 

In some cases we were also approached by fortune 500 companies about
building Zope solutions. In some cases these companies were willing to
take "a risk" and contracted work out to us in other cases they told us 
that the infrastructure was not in place to make Zope a viable platform to
work with. That hurt!

All companies complained about a lack of Zope infrastructure:

What was this infrastructure?

- Zope Hosting
- Documentation
- Training 

and by extension not enough developers who knew how to work with Zope.

What did beehive do?

We became the first European Zope Hosting provider.
We became the first commercial documentation provider.
We were the first company in Europe to offer Zope Training and currently
offer regular training sessions in Berlin (Germany), Paris (France),
Washington D.C. (USA).

I would like to stress that our motivations were:

1. to train our own rapidly growing development team
2. to prove that Zope was viable technology worth investing in / and
   foster community growth
3. figure out what services we really enjoyed providing (money isn't
   everything)

Our conclusion so far is:

* Zope Hosting isn't our thing*

Plenty other companies all over the world are providing this service for
the most up-to-date list please see:

http://www.zope.org/Resources/ZSP 

* Documentation is our thing *

I'll never forget the first Python conference that had a Zope track and
how many people complained about the lack of documentation. beehive had
the same problem but we were documenting how to do things with Zope for
internal use -- it was here that we decided we needed to take a risk and
pay an editor to professionally edit our ebooks. We offered our
documentation for a symbolic price and were amazed to see how many people
across the world were using Zope and were interested in this service.
The word 'many' here is relative. We were doing low volume publishing and 
you can take my word for this -- we have so far not made a profit.
Breaking even is would be nice but we are convinced that without our
efforts the Zope market as a whole would be deemed a little less viable.
And for those complaining about 30 DM or 90 DM prices for our documentation 
-- when you take a look at how many hours, days and months we invest to
produce our documentation and you buy one of our your not even paying for
an hour of our time (at our hourly rate)!

We need to stress that we *love* constructive criticism on how we can
improve our doc efforts. Even if we don't always respond to every mail --
we read it and discuss it at our E&P meetings. A big beehive hug to all
those who have done so in the past.

Regarding our books in print (1 out - 2 to go) if your concerned about
spending double digit DM or $ wait till the book comes out go to a
bookstore grab a chair and read a bit. If you don't like what your
reading -- don't buy the book! 

Again constructive criticism is always welcome -- we have an email address
just for this purpose: zope-ep@beehive.de .

One of our books is out in German two more are on the way:

-- Zope Web Application Construction Kit (October 2001)

Take a look at a copy in your local bookstore when it comes out in mid
October. We hope you'll like it.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672321335/qid=1001066852/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2_2/104-1061433-9733518


-- The Book of Zope (November 2001)

A book aimed more at the beginning programmer. To answer the question
brought up by Takashi Linzbichler The Book of Zope is based on our German 
book but we had more time so we made some changes and added new
information. 

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1886411573/qid=1001066852/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_2_3/104-1061433-9733518


* We love Zope Training *

We have done a lot of individual and corporate training lately and 
love it! Many new training topics are in production. And we hope to 
expand this service to make regular Zope Training available wherever
Zopeists are. 

Hope I've been able to clear up some of the confusion and made some 
of our business decisions more transparent. 

Regards to everyone,

Mark

--------------------------------------------------------------
mark pratt  (managing director) 	mark@beehive.de
beehive elektronische medien GmbH       http://www.beehive.de
phone: +49 30 847-82 0                  fax: +49 30 847-82 299