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OpenACS

Herbert Meyer: Now I'm happy to present Malte Susdorff. Malte Susdorff is representative of another large active community. The name of this community is OpenACS and Malte will give us a short talk.

Malte Susdorff: Now, well I'm trying to talk while logging into the computer. It is not very nice because I can't look directly at you. As always it doesn't work. Well, magic of computers. Hey, it is working. It is always a surprise if you install a new operating system on the night before the presentation and that is exactly what happened to me. So I needed to install RedHead which I'm absolutely unfamiliar with. So, it is kind of an interesting experience. Now that we have the starting page I can actually try to start.

OpenACS is not an content management system. So why on earth are we here? OpenACS is a community solution and it comes from that point. I mean we started in 1994 with the ARS digita community system, short called ACS and after that it evolved, evolved, evolved. Now we have an ACS Java version. But some people figured out that it would be good to have a really open source solution which is open source from front to back which includes the database. So, that is why OpenACS was well started in the beginning and if in our days try to get OpenACS it looks like this if you successfully installed it. Let me then start with some more information. I mean this is running live on my laptop. So, I try to make up some questions and some answers to those questions. I mean the first question was just a dummy question because I couldn't think of a good starting point but I guess everyone or a lot of people of you know this kind of saying. That is exactly how you sometimes feel when dealing with normal community systems. Because they don't give you that much opportunity to use what ever you want.

So what is OpenACS actually? As I said it is a community system. So, we are coming from the dynamic database front end and not from a publishing point of view. Like MMBase comes from media content. They needed a system which can handle their media. Where as a community system ACS and OpenACS is more into stuff like discussion boards, how can people interact with each other. So it is a management tool kit and now comes marketing speech, for building highly sophisticated web based solutions. So, first we have a tool kit which means if you want to use it you need to be kind of a developer. If you want to use the CMS you can always use it like it is, has been presented to you by the developers. But getting it to run and getting it to the user interface that you want is always taking some time and it is always some developer time. Because the standard user interface for the CMS, for OpenACS is to be improved. But I'm coming to that one a little bit later.

The whole system as a tool kit is based on a common data model. It integrates over 50 modules which is enough for solving most of the problems, in various areas providing solutions for content management issues. That is because on of those modules, actually two are CMS modules. What we are seeing here is created with the smaller version of the content management system within ACS. Document management: We have a file storage module inside OpenACS which lets you handle every kind of files including (versioning). We made some comparisons to commercial document management systems and I mean you know those checklists where you have those features on the left side and then the checklists for the various systems. Well we succeeded in getting the most how ever you call them points, score the most points.

Knowledge management: On Saturday we will present you a little bit about knowledge management because content can be shown in various ways. I mean what we see here is web published content management system what we have seen in the first two presentations. But content can be kind of anything. And a knowledge management system I mean knowledge is content. so we will demo you for instant this knowledge management solution. We will definitely demo you the content management solution. But as I said demoing it from the blank user interface might scare you away. So I'm not going to show it to you right here. E-learning, E-commerce, got the picture of all the modules. I guess Zope is roughly in the same area as they provide a lot of functions for their tool kit.

So what about the history: OpenACS derived from the still open source product ARS digita community system developed by ARS digita. The need was as I said driven by the fact that ARS digita uses eurekal as a database and as you all well know eurekal is not open source. It is not cheap and it is not easy to handle either. So, people split up and said O.k. we want to get an approach where we can support an open source database. Postgress was chosen, not MySQL for various reasons. But that is more for to night not for now to discuss. With version 4 which is on the way now. I mean we are in the pre alpha stage. I mean what you are seeing here is 3 Alpha just right installed fresh from CVS which is something like release candidate one as some redman based company would say. And the first Alpha can be expected till the end of the months.

Technology: Now I'm talking only about version 4. It is still based on an application server called AOL server. So, no choice here. You are stocked with it. It is a fast open source product which was developed by a company called Navisoft and then later on bought by AOL. So what drives us to a AOL server is the fact that in 1994 it was the only web server who had very good database connection interface and who provided and built in an application programming language. They use TCL which was at that time still standard as discripting language and Perl picked up and the rest is history. But anyway taking in account that all AOL web servers like Digital City, like AOL.com, with all those many hits and users are running an AOL server you can safely assume that it is a reliable technology. So TCL, Lingua Franca for OpenACS just because it is built into a AOL server but if you download the CVS, check out you have some Java stuff in it, some Perl scripts for everything like around the solution.

If you want to have web mail you need to have Java because the interface to queue mail is working on Java just as an example. O.k. I drop the issue how does it look like in reality because we are running out of time. So and that is what I said OpenACS includes the content management system developed by ARS digita. It has a very good data model. It takes the permission system which is consistent through all of OpenACS, it takes a contemporary pository which is constituent through all of OpenACS. So, it doesn't matter if you store a beboard posting, a discussion board posting, a news item, upload a file, upload a picture in the picture database, have like you e-commerce shopping card.

All the content is stored in one content repository which is true for the CMS to. So, it uses the same content management system but it lacks something which I said in the beginning its user interface. Especially the intuitive part. It is not like you download it and you know exactly what you need to do. Edit this page is a driven down version which we will present which is actually running in the work space, so you can test that one out, play with it. It also uses the same functionalities like it has this permission system, it has this common database model. It has the content repository.

So all the benefits of this whole community solutions can be taken into account. The development on the big, large scale content management system something ARS digita was or is or maybe planing to sell as a commercial product will start when OpenACS has come to the final stages. I just quickly show you how the user interface looks like and if you say it looks roughly the same like any other CMS, yes it does. So, on the left you have your explorer like stuff with your tasks, like what do I need to do because we have a work flow where it says O.k. the editor and I guess you get the picture. We have a site map. We have templates. We have content types. Because you can store any type of content but you can define what type of content you actually have and then define with the template how it will be displayed in various sections of your website depending how many kind of subsections you have.

Just as an example we are running a website for a large assumed organisation and they I mean like every country wants to have their own website and their own style on top of the whole data. So, they can present it to their local customers and partners like pretty basic like have the national flag their which changes every single time, search queue words, I mean you can add users, work flows. It looks roughly the same like any other CMS. If you are interested and especially taking in account that it is a larger solution then just CMS and OpenACS is the not coming from a content management side, feel free to check it out. The site is openacs.org. Blame on me for not putting it up on the site but I guess reading the name, figuring out.org and going to the website should be easy. just some small things.

Community roughly 50 developers working on it full time, roughly 6.000 developers world wide using the system or playing around with it. Future: We‘ll get this product stable in the first place and then we will see. Next step from what I can see is an initiative .lam which is an e-learning platform for universities which will on MIT anyway and some other universities. In Germany it will be Hamburg because I'm teaching there and I'm teaching on that system. So those are some future areas which have more to do with OpenACS and its spread to areas like knowledge management, e-learning instead of playing CMS.

[transcript: Katja Pratschke]


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