As part of our participation in the EVAL-4 project, KnowNet has recently ported a venerable old evaluation tool to play well in Plone sites:

Eval Mentor is a comprehensive online questionnaire which guides and buttresses a dialogue between an evaluator and a project which is commissioning or planning an evaluation.

We were happy to see that the porting process went very quickly - largely because Mentor is heavy on XML and clientside javascript-DOM processing, so all the server needs to know about an instance is its XML data string.

What surprised us (yes, even us :o) was how extremely easy it was to add a knotes group weblog to every Mentor instance (in Mentor, an instance is called a 'dialogue'. The main problems with our old implementation of Mentor were the difficulty of managing users and groups (which is made much simpler by Plone), and the lack of a good system for ad-hoc or focused discussions of issues arising during the Mentor choice-making process. A group weblog is ideal for supporting discussions arising from a Mentor dialogue.

In essence, it only took a dozen lines of simple boiler-plate python script to have every instance of Mentor create within itself a knotes blog. With a little more effort, we can tune the features of these blogs for the purposes Mentor will have in particular, and add fine-grained 'blog-this' affordances within the Mentor questionnaire.

A Plone-based, compact, customisable collaboratibe weblogging system turns out to be a darned useful piece of kit to have at a developer's disposal. We hope that others will be able to explore this kind of integration even further. We'll be releasing Team-Tasks - a resource and goal centred, time-limited collaboration environment which makes use of embedded group weblogs - sometime early in 2005, and hope among ourselves to come up with some more interesting examples of blogging for particular, embedded collaborative purposes.