The following is an overview of the aspects that we (the
timedesk team, from Holland- picture,it may be necessary to
rotate your head)
are facing when using OpenAcs to help people communicate...
We liked ACS from the beginning, but we think the cost of Oracle
is a major obstacle
(what's in a name?) to small companies. OpenAcs seems the natural
next step. Furthermore,
the real open-source spirit is here, with OpenAcs, and it seems like
many ACS hackers have
moved here! It is great to experience so much (and fast!) support.
Naturally, we hope to
be able to make our contribution in due time.
What we want is to use OpenAcs for business-purposes. We have a
couple of orders from
companies (and we are also involved in a government initiative) to
set up a community
system for them. One of the projects that are the most advanced is
one where we have to
construct an on-line directory for a mid-sized company.
At the moment, a community of
secretaries and
management assistants (mostly women) are our great test team. We
are using OpenAcs
3.2.5, PG 7.1, AOLserver 3.4 on RH 7.1 on a test machine (see
below).
Questions:
- Is it better to have a dedicated server for each project/company
or can we use e.g. 1
server for 3 OpenAcs-instances? Bboard says this.
- Is the nsjava machine (nsjava.sourceforge.net)
so far developed that it can be used without trouble? (For chat and
webmail, both very
interesting modules.)
Some aspects:
- Which OpenAcs version? Using OpenAcs 3.2.5. seems the best
option at the moment, at
least 4.x seems to be in development stage.
- Design, templating and functionality (for some of our clients we
want special designs
like frames, modeled like e.g. www.handicap.nl).
Bboard says this.
Templating should get easier with OpenACS 4.x.
- Server scaling
- Server security (ssh for remote control, internal safety etc...
maybe setting up
AOLserver in 'a chrooted environment'). bboard says this.
- SSL
and AOLserver - this is the AOLserver document.
Maybe it is a bit ambitious to want to do all this, but we like a
little challenge...
Besides, your suppport makes us feel we can do it!
The next step now is to have a true development machine for the
things above, besides
the machine we are using for testing the functionality.
Unfortunately, we cannot do much
with the 'test machine' as it is already being used quite
extensively. The 'webmaster' who used
to be a language
student but is now becoming a 'nerd' is already happy it is running
anyway, even though
many things are not working. Well, maybe he should start all over
again to really get to
know things...
What we have as a development machine is a P133, 64 MB. A bit
underspecified perhaps.
Both this and the test machine (1GHz Athlon, 384MB) are plugged in a
10 Mbit HUB connected
to a cable modem (up 15kB/s (tough luck), down <450 kB/s). It is
amazing how much you
can do with modest means, but there are boundaries.
Well folks, thank you in advance for reactions!
Ben, Hans, Renny