Will CKAN be the best solution for a portal like asiapacificenergy.org?
If yes, can you provide an estimate of how much effort, time and developers would be required?
Any tips or best practices you can share for an inexperienced team? Any pitfalls to avoid?
Thank you very much.
Any help would be highly appreciated!
Kind of hard to say. Depends exactly what you want to do exactly.
From ckan.org:
CKAN, the world’s leading Open Source data portal platform CKAN is a powerful data management system that makes data accessible – by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data.
CKAN is like wordpress but instead of blog posts its datasets. It helps manage and inventory datasets for an organization. It has other cool and powerful features too but that site you mentioned reminds me of ArcGIS kind of. There is also Socrata or many other vendor offerings. I prefer CKAN though.
There is a demo site (demo.ckan.org) you can play with, add and remove stuff from, etc to get a feel for it.
They have decent documentation as well that you can follow https://docs.ckan.org/en/2.8/user-guide.html . You could setup a local version to get a feel for how hard or easy it is. https://docs.ckan.org/en/2.8/maintaining/installing/install-from-source.html
I'd say you need someone with python and server experience to get you setup and then basic usage and administration can be delegated. But it can be learnt.
Gov.uk uses ckan for their data catalogue and have some helpful docs available as well. https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/manual/data-gov-uk-supporting-ckan.html
Related
I'm looking for some good tools that help to share tips, best practices, company standards, etc. amongs developers in my company. Two tools I'm currently considering are a wiki (screwturn wiki) or Sharepoint 2010. I'm wondering if there is something better suited to the task, or any input anyone has on this subject. I'd prefer something that's windows based (i.e. runs on IIS, can authenticate users against Active Directory etc) but I am open to anything.
Well, you're right, the most suitable computer tool is Wiki. There are many engines available. We use Atlassian Confluence. It is good to write down things that contains many formal details. Like client-server protocol description, or game-design / UI-design documents.
However for sharing tips, best-practices, interesting investigations etc no tool will overcome live talk! I've came to this conclusion for many times. Daily standups and pair programming lead to much much better information circulation than any computer-based tool I ever seen.
At my company we use a private MediaWiki installation. It works very well for our needs.
Publicly we share programming knowledge at DocForge.
I have a client who has been using WebOffice (from WebEx) for a variety of tasks within their small organization. The problem is that they only really need a small subset of the features WebOffice provides (Contact list, Database, and Document Storage).
They've asked me to develop a website focused on these three features with the rationalization that this should be more cost-effective, since they currently aren't using many of the features of WebOffice they pay for.
What are some open-source alternatives that I could implement for them? Sharepoint sounds like it would be too bloated and Google Apps may not be as collaborative as they would like.
We looked at sharepoint and went like "meh". Anything interesting you want to do with it requires prohibitive licensing, and if you expose any piece of it to the internet then the cost just blows any budget away.
We are piloting a deployment of Alfresco, with KnowledgeTree also being a very decent option, IMO. As for the main site, something like OpenAtrium looks like a pretty decent and flexible fit without much configuration needed. OpenAtrium is based on Drupal.
SharePoint sounds like a good match? Did whoever told you it was bloated also mention why?
You might only need WSS which is free (if you have Windows Server).
My company hosts LumiPortal (www.lumiportal.com) which is similar to WebOffice but with drive letters for storage. If you have inhouse technical expertise, then on the open source side we see Joomla and Drupal, which could be thought of as classic content management systems. If you have in-house technical expertise, you might look at Drupal and their document management component first.
Call WebOffice customer service and tell them. They will probably adjust your payment options to suit your needs.
There's a good roundup of online collaboration/office suites here although it is a bit dated now.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_office_2007_year_in_review.php
Webex WebOffice hasn't been updated in 5 years and has been sunset by Webex with no migration path (confirmed in their forums) so I would get off it ASAP.
With the addition of Wave to Google Apps it would seem to be a much more cost effective and modern replacement.
Can anyone recommend resources to learn how to develop websites, as opposed to web applications?
I am looking to develop a website for a consulting company to be precise. I would be more interested in best practices for creating the layout of a website (user appeal, eye candy, not an eye sore)
Thanks
-M
It really depends upon the language you want to use, your current skill sets, who's going to maintain the site, what OS the site will be hosted on etc etc.
I suspect you need to narrow down your question.
What do you mean by web site rather than web application? Are you talking about the dynamic nature of the content or somethign else?
update
If you're looking for discussions on design of websites (visual design, UX etc) then I'm a great fan of Smashing Magazine.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
It doesn't often speak about MS technologies (ASP.NET etc) but it's a great place to see discussions and papers on "what makes a great website". Some recent examples:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/15/optimizing-conversion-rates-its-all-about-usability/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/14/non-profit-website-design-examples-and-best-practices/
Subscribe to their RSS feed and see what those colouring-in people get up to.
Here's your first port of call.
Unless you're artistically inclined, I recommend purchasing or contracting the template design to someone who is skilled in this area.
For $60 a year, you can have unlimited downloads and unlimited use of all the templates at the following site:
http://www.dreamtemplate.com/
There are many more here:
http://www.templatemonster.com/website-templates.php
http://www.w3schools.com/
for purely informational sites, html, and css will probably be plenty, though I think I would reccomend using wordpress if you're just trying to put content on the internet
If you speak German or French, http://www.selfhtml.org is quite a good resource.
Otherwise, I would recommend http://www.w3schools.com/ or http://htmldog.com/. Both are very good as they really go deeply into the matter and tell about standards from the beginning.
sitepoint.com
Their best content is packaged in their books, but their articles are good, too. Covers design best-practices and web standards, but also has good tips on the business of web design and managing clients.
You may want to look at the alistapart website.
simply the best I have seen for this.
I would also - since I have just been reminded of it use
http://www.webmonkey.com/
http://w3schools.com/
http://www.w3schools.com/ is a good start.
In my organisation, we have some very inefficient processes around managing requirements, tracking what was actually delivered on what versions, etc, do subsequent releases break previous functionality, etc - its currently all managed manually. The requirements are spread over several documents and issue trackers, and the implementation details is in code in subversion, Jira, TestLink. I'm trying to put together a system that consolidates the requirements info, so that it is sourced from a single, authoritative source, is accessible via standard interfaces - web services, browsers, etc, and can be automatically validated against. The actual domain knowledge is not that complicated but is highly proprietary and non-standard (i.e., not just customers with addresses, emails, etc), and is relational: customers have certain functionalities, features switched on/off, specific datasources hooked up - all on specific versions. So modelling this should be straightforward.
Can anyone advise the best approach for this - I a certain that I can develop a system from scratch that matches exactly the requirements, in say ruby on rails, grails, or some RAD framework. But I'm having difficulty getting management buy-in, they would feel safer with an off the shelf solution.
Can anyone recommend such a system? Or am I better off building it from scratch, as I feel I am? I'm afraid a bought system would take just as long to deploy, and would not meet our requirements.
Thanks for any advice.
I believe that you are describing two different problems. The first is getting everyone to standardize and the second is selecting a good tool for requirements management. I wouldn't worry so much about the tool as I would the process and the people. Having the best tool in the world won't help if your various project managers don't want to share.
So, my suggestion is to start simple. Grab Redmine or Trac and take on the challenge of getting everyone to standardize. Once you have everyone in the right mindset then you can improve the tools you use for storage.
{disclaimer - mentioning my employer's product}
The brief experiments I made with a commercial tool RequisitePro seemed pretty good me. Allowed one to annotate existing Word docs and create a real-time linked database of the identified requisistes then perform lots of analysis and tracking of them.
Sometimes when I see a commercial product I think "Oh, well nice glossy bits but the fundamentals I could knock up in Perl in a weekend." That's not the case with this stuff. I would certainly look at commercial products in this space and exeperiment with a couple (ReqPro has a free trial, I guess the competition will too) before spending time on my own development.
Thanks a mill for the reply. I will take a look at RequisitePro, at least I'll be following the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" strategy ;) youre right, and I kinda knew it, in these situations, buy is better. It is tempting when I can visualise throwing it together quickly, but theres other tradeoffs and risks with that approach.
Thanks,
Justin
While Requisite Pro enforces a standard and that can certainly help you in your task, I'd certainly second Mark on trying to standardize the input by agreement with personnel and using a more flexible tool like Trac, Redmine (which both have incredibly fast deploy and setup times, especially if you host them from a VM) or even a custom one if you can get the management to endorse your project.
I am currently working on a project which requires migration of content from different content management Systems to SharePoint. Are there any good, preferably open source, tools that would help me do this? Also, what are the best practices that I would have to keep in mind when it comes to such projects. One more thing that i would like to factor here is reusablity, because we might have to work on similar migration projects, from other Content Management systems in future.
You can check http://www.codeplex.com/SPMigration (open source, project started by a Microsoft consultant).
This framework gives you an importer tool, as well as some exporter example (FileSystem for example). You'll problably have to code your own exporter.
This MSDN blog also goes into some detail about the Migration API and may be useful as its generally very had to do this sort of thing without getting your hands dirty
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdeveloperdocs/archive/2007/11/30/content-migration-in-sharepoint.aspx
Also, IMHO you shouldn't dismiss proprietary products as although they can be expensive they may save you considerable time and therefore cost if you have a large conversion project.
http://www.tzunami.com/Pages/default.aspx
http://www.avepoint.com/products/sharepoint-migration
Tricks and tips -
http://www.parallelspace.net/portals/ALS305-mwherman-Content%20Migration-1-1-18-RC6_FINAL.ppt
We have had good mileage from going to the nearest university and grabbing some IT students to do a manual migration.
The students like the extra cash and it is sometimes easier when the Information Architectures of the site changes between systems.