[Zope] Architecture Suggestions?

[Richard Gordon]

hi

I last played around with Zope maybe 18 mos. ago and didn't 
particularly care for it, but have recently gotten interested again- 
either it's improved greatly or I have or maybe both, but in any case 
I'm seriously considering it for use in a rather peculiar project and 
would appreciate any suggestions that you may care to offer.

Briefly, a client of mine has an intranet web site that contains its 
ISO-9000 documentation. The content is almost entirely in native 
Word, Excel, etc. format (not because that's a good idea, it's just 
the way things had to be and have to remain as a practical matter). 
There are over 1600 documents and around a third of them have 2700 
hyperlinks embedded in the text flow that use relative addressing. As 
you would expect, the file sizes are huge- the largest is 9.4 megs 
and the average is 181k- if you throw out the largest 50 and smallest 
50, the average is still 114k.

Anyway, this has worked better than it should for about a year in 
spite of being served by the miserable IIS on NT and I've used python 
scripting to handle the menu maintenance and to do some fairly arcane 
reporting. The site is actively used by maybe 150 people a day and 
something significant changes at least 2-3 times a week. Suffice it 
to say that there have been regular problems as well, about 80% 
because of IIS (i.e., mystery file and folder locking for weeks at a 
time and other functionality that you can read about in the M$ bug 
database) and the balance because the IT guys are slackers who 
apparently have very little understanding about how NT works.

The upshot is that now there is talk of migrating the whole thing 
into Lotus Notes (using a web interface) and actually storing the 
files in Notes mainly to obtain better reporting. This strikes me as 
absurd given the file sizes and the need to reset all of the embedded 
links in the documents among other things, so I am thinking more 
along the lines of a) getting this site moved onto its own server, 
preferably either bsd or linux, and b) using apache to serve the 
static files from the file system and c) using Zope to handle the 
interface, any DB connections that are appropriate, and managing 
things via ExternalFile. I would assume that the internal links will 
work without any changes since the file system is still the same.

Does anyone see a big problem with this approach? And does anyone 
have experience with Lotus Notes in this type of project? I've never 
heard anything good about Domino server except that it was 
appropriately named, but....

Thanks & sorry to ramble on for so long.

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