Forum OpenACS Q&A: Intranet ported?

1: Intranet ported?

Posted by Radam Batnag on 07/30/02 06:42 AM

Hi,

I noticed that there is no Intranet module in OpenACS 4.5. Is it
because: (1) Nobody deemed it important enough, hence nobody worked on
porting it, or (2) Intranet functionality can be easily accomplished
using the existing OpenACS 4.5 modules?

Thanks.

2: Response to Intranet ported? (response to 1)

Posted by Andrei Popov on 07/30/02 12:55 PM

(1) There was no Intranet module in AD's ACS 4.x (IIANM, it is in 5.0-java).

(2) It cannot -- there was a lot in ACS Classic's (3.x) Intranet that is entirely absent in OACS 4.5 OTOH, much of what is in OACS 4.5 can be very wll used to build Intranet in the most efficient way.

If you search this thread, you will see that there were suggestions made of porting 3.x Intranet to OACS 4.5, however status of those is not known. I did try to poke around the thing and see what could be done, but, as usual, too little time to really do anything -- did not get anywhere.

3: Response to Intranet ported? (response to 1)

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 07/31/02 08:09 AM

I would add that dotlrn would do a lot of the things that Intranet used to do. I guess we should look for a way of easily custoimizing it (removing classes, terms and things like that) and leaving the communities.

We should find a way of adapting dotlrn to a knowledge management tool.

4: Response to Intranet ported? (response to 1)

Posted by Tapiwa Sibanda on 07/31/02 10:49 AM

I totally agree with Rafael. However, instead of removing classes, and terms, I think we should convert them into events. Communities are important, but a lot of the time (e.g. conferneces), they are temporary. Classes could therefore be OACSexpo2001, OACSexpo2002 etc.

5: Response to Intranet ported? (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 07/31/02 06:26 PM

I'm going to be doing a lot of work at the beginning of next year
converting our ACS 3.4x intranet into an OpenACS based on. I
expect it to be a lot of work, but God I can't wait to be on OACS!

We've done a lot of customization for the Intranet... but I would be
interested in making sure our work can be used by other people,
and I am interested in working with anyone else interested in
developing an Intranet solution. The issue, of course, is going to
be whether our customizations will work with other people's
objectives

I'm not promising that it's going to be done at the beginning of
the year -- I'm just saying I'm expecting to start working on it then.

We'll also be working on upgrade scripts from ACS 3.4 Intranets.
However, these are all going to be somewhat ad hoc. We'll
share our scripts, but won't promise that they'll work :)

6: Response to Intranet ported? (response to 1)

Posted by Caroline Meeks on 07/31/02 08:46 PM

Tapiwa,

dotLRN does have the concept of a community being active only between two dates. After all a class runs for only one term. There is also the concept of archiving a class after its over. I haven't used either very much yet but they ought to be usefull for conferences etc.

I agree that the dotLRN framework will be very usefull for intranet functionality. Personally I like the idea of creating a "dotWRK" distribution that configures in a sensible way for a company. Perhaps Jade's work will evolve into that.

7: Response to Intranet ported? (response to 1)

Posted by Tapiwa Sibanda on 08/01/02 03:07 PM

Hi Caroline I am aware that dotLRN does support communities (classes?) that are active for a temporary amount of time. A couple of things though..

My post was merely suggesting that instead of getting rid of classes, as Rafael has initially suggested, we keep them and use them for temporary communities. IIRC normal communities (clubs?) do not have "terms". For example, while you can have a PHY101 class, the fall, and summer semesters would have different subsites. On the other hand, the Football Club subsite continues across semesters.

I have not looked at the dotLRN code, and my last install was a couple of months ago, but in this thread, DonB mentions that "there is hardwiring (of classes and clubs) in parts of the code"

I quite like your idea of a "dotWRK distribution". The way I see things, the dots, (dotWRK, dotLRN, dotSELL?) should be distributions. While the main development goes on in the core, and in the packages, the distros would provide package suited to a particular task, from intranet, to online store.

8: Response to Intranet ported? (response to 1)

Posted by Yonatan Feldman on 08/01/02 03:27 PM

fyi, we are already planning on splitting up dotlrn into dotlrn-core and dotlrn-education. this would allow someone to build a dotlrn-intranet package analogous to dotlrn-education for use for intranets. this isn't going to happen now but it is going to happen.

9: Response to Intranet ported? (response to 1)

Posted by Talli Somekh on 08/01/02 09:17 PM

Yon said: "fyi, we are already planning on splitting up dotlrn into dotlrn-core and dotlrn-education. this would allow someone to build a dotlrn-intranet package analogous to dotlrn-education for use for intranets. this isn't going to happen now but it is going to happen."

But isn't that what the openacs core is for? Meaning, isn;t dotlrn a package on top of openacs? So dotlrn-intranet would be dotlrn-core on top of openacs-core?

Wouldn't it be easier to get the dotlrn core into openacs?

talli

10: Response to Intranet ported? (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 08/02/02 01:10 AM

Isn't "dotlrn-education" a bit redundant?