Zope3 / ECM Project Launched !

The main goal of this project is to build the next-generation Open Source ECM Platform on top of Zope 3 able to compete with the major ECM solutions on the market such as Documentum, OpenText, etc.

It's been discussed seriously since last year's Castle sprint, and some events occurred such as the Zope3 / ECM sprint in March in Paris this year where people from the major Zope 2 CMS projects were represented. (CPS, Plone, Silva, and Zope Corporation people were there) showing everybody's interests in working together on a common project as a first commitment in this effort.

We believe the first iteration for such a project is to :

• discuss together and share our respective experiences,
• come up with an architecture that everybody feels good with,
• write specifications,
• validate the specifications.

For now we set up :

• a mailing list
• the project's resources repository
  All interested parties are welcome / expected to subscribe to the mailing-list and join the portal. The website will soon (in next 2 days) contains documentation about some collaboration rules (that will be discussed on the mailing- list). For now, it contains a few document like some braindumps about the global infrastructure and some arcticles.
• a source repository with the existing component started during last sprint plus some new ones

The project started under the name of z3lab.

What is Z3Lab ?

Z3Lab aims at building a strong community leveraging the experiences of both individuals and companies that are involved in the Zope ECM/ CMS market nowadays to create the best ECM platform on the market and offer high-value professional services to customers.

ECM Platform

The project's main goals are :

• to unify the whole Zope/CMS-involved community to drastically reduce waste of resources (doing twice or more equivalent components / features).
• to spread Zope 3 technology on the market by providing a world class ECM Platform with companies providing consulting worldwide and backing the project.

Open issues

They are still some open issues that needs to be discussed and fixed :

• For the moment, Nuxeo is hosting alpha code in its repository but this is not intended to be definitive. We just need to agree on a place where to put the code. codespeak.net is an option that will be considered seriously. If you want to take part of the discussion you may join the z3lab mailing list. But please, do not make it the main point of the discussion. There is a lot of work to do even before writing a useful single line of code (design / architecture specs for example).
• Licensing: we consider using the ZPL. Same as above. We would really like to avoid all sterile flamewars :-) We have time to discuss these point zenly
• Copyright Assignmen: until now the copyright assignment is on the contributor.

Though, all the tools we need to start working are in place now and available on Z3Lab.

To help the project bootstrap, 2 core developers of Nuxeo (Florent and Julien) are staffed full-time on this project. Jean-Marc Orliaguet, Chalmer University, is also already strongly commited to this project

On of the short term goal is to present some of the components to our community at EP this year.

All the community has been waiting for a Zope 3 based ECM far too long. It's the right time to move on together.

Get involved now ! :)