Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS relative to RedHat ECM

Good day all;

A few years back, I paid attention to ArsDigita taking
a nose dive and thought it a great shame, as it
seemed like really excellent software, though I was
not enamoured of the port to Java. IMHE, Java just
doesn't word as advertised.

I work in a somewhat hetrogenous environment, and
have just never seen Java web apps work universally
across win32, unix and mac as folks say it will. But
this is a digression.

I am not a programmer, I can sometimes fuss my way
through some scripting, and kludge up some php
stuff that kinda hangs together. At any rate, I've
been in search of the Holy Grail of "Collaborative
Server" for some time now, and was on the
verge of giving up and deciding I was just going
to have spoke something up myself when I stumbled
(quite literally, I was looking for something else)
into the RedHat ECM system.

My jaw dropped when I saw the screen shot featured
at http://www.redhat.com/software/ccm/collaboration
I had pretty much convinced myself that I was going
to have to try to roll up some kinda blog/wiki/webdav/
cvs/ thing that was going to be a horrible kudge that
would probably never work. Then that screen shot
showed me exactly what I was looking for. It
even looked like what I had in mind.

However, after reviewing all the prerequsite
documents and other oddball stuff, I got
cold feet over the RedHat CCM Open License.
That and I don't trust Java.

At any rate, I was wondering if anyone here
is either doing or is aware of anyone doing
with OpenACS something along the lines of
the RedHat ECM system?

I supposed I should clarify that question.
In short, the company I work for does
design/build work in the audiovisual industry.
To greatly oversimplify, we build meeting rooms.
Right now, document management is complete mess.
I have a pretty normal hierarchal file server
back end serving up files for macs and win32 machines
of various flavors with all kinds of tiers for
sales folks, administrative folks, system
programmers and design folks. There is the
ever persistant buggabo of the horror known
as "Project Management" a thing no one can
actually come up with a working definition for,
and all that.
So, I was dreaming of the "one ring" as it were.
Plug in a project number, and off you go to
a web page where there is a calendar, a
discussion forum, a list of all related files
complete with revision history, cad drawings,
check-in, check-out, or read-only downloads,
system programmer source code (if permissions
allow) with version control and all that.

Seems like this is what RedHat has come up
with, and I know they didn't do this in a
vacuum.

So, again, is anyone else doing work along
these lines?

Thanks in advance,

chipper

ECM is only available now to those who is subscribe to RH.  Its not yet available to the public.  Also that screenshot may well be ACS Tcl, as you can observe the address location is not present.  There had been many screen shots given by aD previously claiming it was CCM, where in fact its ACS Tcl because the URL gave it away.

CCM is a fine platform, but as of now the one that is available to the public is just the core and CMS.  ECM and postgres support is not available for the public yet.

Here is their release policy of the code:

http://ccm.redhat.com/faq.html#release-policy

If you need something now and only have few developer resources OpenACS is a good choice.  If you have a lot of developer resources, keen on using Java and willing to pay RH.  CCM is also a fine choice.

Jun

You nailed it.
I was stunned by the dotWRK demo.

That is no futher off my mark than
the RedHat ECM. And of course, license
and architecture wise, quite a bit
closer.