Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Open Source and business thoughts

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Posted by David Kuczek on
We should definitely make openacs.org a more informative and
spectecular place for decision makers or people that do
research for them.

1. Technical Perspective (marketing talk)

Use the magic power of buzzwords. Note that this is mainly
marketing talk...

We should have "optimized" opeanacs.rpm packages for Red
Hat Database. (Red Hat Database, as RH calls it, is an
PostgreSQL Database "optimized" for RH 7.1 Systems)

Apache is another buzzword a lot of people are praying on. It
would be nice, if we could promote Petru's fastcgi package a
little bit, as soon as it is done. Is it possible to run the fastcgi
solution without having to install AOLserver? I am asking,
because Petru was talking about running both servers on one
machine, unless I misunderstood something. Maybe we could
place such a package as being "optimized" for Red Hat
Database and easy to install via rpm??!!

I believe that ISPs will more likely offer RedHatDatabase than
AOLserver in the future.  I don't know how willing those ISPs will
be to integrate the fastcgi module though...  But if they are, we
might even try to persuade ISPs to offer ready-to-go openacs
services to their customers. This is were the integration of
openoffice into openacs could be valuable and a certain threat to
.NET

These suggestions solely concentrate on the "mainstream"
market and serve to spread the word of openacs. I am not
discrediting other distributions like Debian etc. The fact that
Sony's Playstation harddrives will run on "Red Hat" in the future
shows, how popular the word "Red Hat" might get.

2. Marketing Perspective (marketing talk)

We should really improve on our corporate identity or should we
rather call it organizational identity?

The layout of openacs.org could use some improvement. What
about letting the community make simple-to-implement layout
suggestions, which we could vote on via poll in the end... The
existent logo is nice, I think.

We should have a page that lists all the modules and briefly
describes what they are able to achieve.

Additionally we should activate all modules and feed them with
some dummies. i.e. some pictures in photodb. some people
and tasks in the intranet module etc.

Then we could use the curriculum module to create virtual tours
for every module. Surley all the presented modules would have
to be in the new openacs-layout.

Creme it would be, to have a showroom where customers could
click together their own version of openacs. They would register
with our showroom and get customer.openacs.org, which they
could customize with their logo, their company colors in the
header and the modules they would like to use for their needs.

We should show, how easy it is, to customize openacs. And
surely how great it can scale, once implemented.