Here at
PPS, we've been using OpenACS for about 5 or 6 years. At first, we built a relatively simple resource site called
Urban Parks Online, and a community site called
Great Public Spaces using OpenACS version3. Neither of these could be considered a large knowledge management system, but for us they were a warm up.
Our most recent project was a Transportation resource center built for the Federal Highway Administration using OpenACS 5. It contains hundreds of case studies, images, and publications, and aims to solicit content from the large community of Transportation practitioners (mainly at state Departments of Transportation). So far, it is full of content, but the community side hasn't taken off yet.
Similar to Håkan's experience, we chose OpenACS for its strong backend - scalability, permissions, and subsiting. In all of these regards, we have been satisfied (we chose between OpenACS, Zope, Plumtree, and Interwoven). However, the overall UI has been problematic and time-consuming. While most applications in OpenACS have reasonable administration pages, there is not a user-friendly main admin page that is appropriate for content managers. In general, the language and polish within acs is very sparse and techy-oriented. We have also spent more time than we expected customizing the display templates (admittedly, there was a steep learning curve for us, and now that we know our way around better it's much faster).
That certainly doesn't answer all of your questions, but perhaps the first 2.
Best of luck on the thesis,
Nick
