Plone NGO Mailing List Christian Aid go for Microsoft over Open Source

[Andy McKay]

Unfortunately offline is here to stay for quite a long time, and for  
organisations that go into places with poor internet connectivity a  
common problem that isn't going to get solved soon. Gosh I have  
problems getting online in the north of england :)

The moving of data on and offline is relatively straightfoward and a  
known problem. You have to snyc the content up and down at some  
point, lock it and so on. That's all doable, but I don't know of  
anyone working on that in Plone. If anyone is, let me know.

One of the big problems is that you lose a huge amount of  
functionality when you take people out of Plone. You can't have  
people running local Plone's in most situations. So to edit a peice  
of content, I couldn't use say Kupu... so instead people rely on rich  
editors and before we know it everyone's using Word and we have  
another problem.

This is compounded by complex, structured content types. At it's  
simplest, how do you edit a Plone event offline? iCal or Outlook?  
They will load files and then save them internally, so you can't  
really use those. You either have to limit it down "we'll only edit  
Word or HTML documents", find standard rich editors (eg Word or XML  
editor) or use some made up syntax (eg ExternalEditor and the way it  
adds metadata).
--
   Andy McKay