Haven’t had much time to update this blog lately. Lots of new and
exciting stuff going on. One of the most exciting things is that we
(read Mark Hammond) are working on exposing the guts of Enfold
Desktop (previously known as Plone Desktop) through COM and a
simple event model. That opens a exciting new world of possibilities.

For an example, take this quote from Microsoft (R) COM page on .NET:

COM and .NET are complementary development technologies.
The .NET Common Language Runtime provides bi-directional, transparent
integration with COM. This means that COM and .NET applications and
components can use functionality from each system. This protects your
existing investments in COM applications while allowing you to take
advantage of .NET at a controlled pace.

That’s only one of the possibilities. You can also access COM
objects from Delphi, or Visual Basic, or even
VBScript. What about a Excel macro to batch-import your
content from a spreadsheet into Plone? That would be cool eh?

We are currently exploiting this functionality by writing a plugin in
Visual Basic that responds to a event and fires up a form
enforcing that some metadata is filled on any uploaded file. That’s
just one practical example. See this quote from a chat with Mark Hammond:

markh: we could also offer virus scanning via the ED plugin mechanism :)
sidnei: as in virus scanning through the com object?
markh: it would be easy for a plugin to hook an upload event and
ask a scanner if it is clean, then refuse to upload if not
sidnei: amazing
markh: especially if the scanner itself had a com interface ;)

This is all progressing slowly, in the time Mark is not working on
adding Python for XUL scripting.

In other news, we are cranking out on a project that will use
Entransit (Symposium Talk Summary)to deploy content from Plone to
be later processed and served from a Zope 3 application using
lxml, ZPT and psycopgda.

On another front, we recently had a customer install Enfold Server
and Enfold Proxy on one of his servers to evaluate replacing
Vignette by Plone. Total time including download to get
Enfold Server and Enfold Proxy setup and authenticating users to his
existing LDAP setup? 12 minutes. Yes, that’s right. 12
minutes. The customer is exceedingly happy about this, and we hope to
be able to disclose more information about it in the near future.

That gives a rough idea of the current pace of things at
Enfold Systems. All I can say is that it’s the most innovative
company I’ve worked on and it’s an honor to be able to share my
virtual workspace with those heroes.