Eduzope --> Plone + Silva --> XLMPlone --> SIF?

I just had a look at the Eduzope site and there list of companies that are 
part of the Eduzope coalition ( http://www.eduzope.org/companies ).

I was very interested to read the following:

"The combined integration of Plone and Infrae's Silva is the basis of the 
EduZope project."

As another post mentioned, it does not seem to be very active, but maybe 
Infrae, Plone and the other contributors have done some more work behind the 
scenes?

If the integration of Plone and Silva were to come about it would put to rest 
my only hesitations about Zope/Plone: the lack of built-in XML support. Good 
XML support is necessary so that any tools that are made can work with other 
applications in an educational environment throught the Schools 
Interoperability Framework (SIF - see http://www.sifinfo.org/ ) or some other 
XML standard (do any others exist?).

It appears that there is a good amount of industry support for SIF (is this 
true?) and even an opensource version of the communication hub that SIF 
requires, a ZIF. This is the OpenSIF project found at http://www.opensif.org/ .
Unfortunatly OpenSIF looks as stagnant as EduZope; there has not been a new 
release of their software since Feb 2002.

Can anyone tell me whether these projects (Eduzope, OpenSIF) are dead, on 
hiatus, or just in need of more support?

Also, how much is SIF used in the 'real-world' outside of the example schools 
in the Future Schools project?

We can do a really good project even if we are not standards compliant 
initially, but it would still be nice to work towards some sort of standard so 
that our system can easily work with other school/university information 
system components. This would mean that we do not have to feel compelled to 
provide for every information task that a school/university could need, but we 
could concentrate on doing a few things really well.  I've just had a look at 
lists of free software for education, and there are many good single task 
applications that my school can never use because they can not be integrated 
into other information systems. Also many programs seem to be linux only which 
immediately rules them out for many people - at least with Python we will not 
suffer that fate!

Just my humble opinions, any comments welcome :-)

p.s.

I only just heard about EduZope and SIF yesterday, so any more information or 
opinions about them would be useful.

Richard Boyd


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