Forum OpenACS Development: Announcing Project/Open

I think it's a better idea to keep the discussions about P/O in its own thread, so here is the posting again.

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It's really a pity - I've seen the dotWrk pages only a few days ago. Even Dirk Gomez didn't know about them. So I think I have duplicated some efforts...

I'm working on a similar project since June 2003. I started as a project management system for a local translation agency (http://www.sls-international.com/ - someone needs _high_quality_ translation into Spanish? 😊. Briefly checking for alternative system, I decided to go ahead with the old ACS 3.4.8 Intranet that is in productive use at Competitiveness (http://www.competitiveness.com/) with a few enhancements. So I spent the summer customizing the system and building a reasonable business solution.

Telling a few friends about the project and showing them the new GUI, they encouraged me to widen the scope and to actually design a "Project Resource Planning" platform, providing support for several vertical modules (Hi Malte!). So http://www.project-open.org/ popped up into existence.

Recently things got even a little more encouraging. I managed to convince a student from Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya to write his final thesis about building a translation marketplace module for Project/Translation and La Salle University approved a Knowledge-Management workgroup, staffed with 4-5 final thesis students. They are going to use Project/Open as their development base.

So the idea is starting to convert itself into real systems. I'm planning to publish some press releases as soon as I've got a reasonable demo system online.

The drawbacks of the system are its ACS 4.5.8 base, its lack of multilingual support and the restriction to Oracle. And I had to customize the platform quite a bit, in order to get a new fine-grained permission system working  (http://www.project-open.com/whitepapers/).

Code is currently not available publicly, because Project/Translation contains customer owned code. The current "Project/Advertizing" project with Opus 5 (http://www.opus5.info/, currently my first priority) will lead to a modularized system and the release of a "core" module and an "advertizing" specific extension module. I hope to finish this reorganization around 11/2003.

A lot of things are still open to discuss or clarify:

- Is Project/Open going to be a separate project, just using the ACS/OACS platform, or is it going to be integrated into OACS?

- How to design the relationship between dotWrk and P/O?

- How to deal with conflicts between the open-source idea and commercial interests? What does the history of ArsDigita and the current state of the OACS system teach us? How to integrate "business guys" into "the community"?

- Is OACS going to take over some of the P/O concepts, such as the fine-grain permission model and the configurable views?

- ... and many more.

Anyway, I think the follow-up discussions should take place in another thread, not to trash the great contibutions above...

Bests,
Frank

mailto:fraber@fraber.de, http://www.fraber.de/

Ok now the the real reply. I must have misread some of your post. I see now your project is based on ACS 3.4.8. I did look at the whitepaper on permissions. It looks like the system you have developed is very similar in the functionality of the OpenACS permissions model. OpenACS can already define additional permissions and assign them based on group membership and roles.