Re: [seul-edu] Site tools for Schoolforge

[Tom Hoffman <tom_hoffman@mac.com>]

On Thursday 29 November 2001 11:04 pm, you wrote:
> Tom -
>
> Hi.  Thanks for your comments on your increasing success with Zope and CMF.
> I would be curious if you could do a quick (a 10 minute) once-over on how
> that compares with the Microsoft product called Encarta Class Server
> (http://www.microsoft.com/education/?ID=ECS).  I have mentioned this
> product on this list before, but have not had much success on getting
> suggestions on alternatives.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Harish

Hm.  I hadn't seen this Encarta Class Server before.  I should be going to 
bed but now I'm looking at the product tour...

Zope is a lower level tool.  It is a web server and object database with a 
web interface (and lots more...).  The equivalent Microsoft products would be 
more like Active Server Pages and SQL Server, I think.  The Encarta Class 
Server might be built on top of those products.  Likewise, the CMF and 
whatever tools you'd create to customize for a school website would be run on 
top of Zope, mostly as Python scripts.

I have been reluctant to adopt and particularly spend money on pre-configured 
school software because we are trying to create a non-traditional system of 
assessment and all the preconfigured software I have seen is, understandably, 
built around more traditional processes.

It seems like Mimerdesk is probably trying to do mostly the same thing as 
Encarta, but I'm not sure.

--Tom