No Name Group http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/ en Copyright 2008 Mon, 09 Apr 2007 11:12:57 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=3.35 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Xythos I heard of this product about a year ago, through NERCOMP. Just today I noticed that NERCOMP has negotiated a licensing agreement with them - giving members (us) special pricing over the normal academic pricing. This might be worth looking into further.

Education - Faculty - Students - Safe File Access

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http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2007/04/xythos.html http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2007/04/xythos.html Products Mon, 09 Apr 2007 11:12:57 -0500 Uportal Uportal is a free portal under development by institutions of higher-education.

Schools using Uportal...

The platfrom is based on Java, XML, JSP and J2EE.

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http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2007/03/uportal.html http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2007/03/uportal.html Products Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:06:38 -0500 Digital Archive System Digital Archive Systems (DAS) can be used to capture, store, index, preserve, and distribute digital content. Such a system which supports versioning, could potentially provide the same functionality as the Document Management Systems we mentioned earlier.

NITLE is currently running a DSpace pilot: http://b2e.nitle.org/index.php/2006/11/04/nitle_dspace_pilot_service_launched

However, the current releases of DSpace do not support versioning. DSpace 1.4 was released in December 2006. I have come across postings that claim versioning will be available in DSpace 2.0.

FEDORA is an open source DAS that does support versioning.

FEDORA: http://www.fedora.info/

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http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2007/03/digital_archive_system.html http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2007/03/digital_archive_system.html Products Mon, 26 Mar 2007 09:11:45 -0500 Sakai as Collaboration Tool The LMS Group is looking at Sakai as one of the possibilities to replace WebCT. Sakai is a community-source project, originally intended as a replacement for Lotus Notes though now being used extensively as a learning management system.

If Sakai is chosen as our new LMS - an even if it isn't - I think it's worth a close look as a possible collaboration tool. It also has some communication functions we should look at.

This video gives a good overview of the Sakai Project.

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http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2007/03/sakai_as_collaboration_tool.html http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2007/03/sakai_as_collaboration_tool.html Products Tue, 06 Mar 2007 08:03:30 -0500 Second Meeting We met on January 12, 2007.

Present: Matt Engel, Mike Richwalsky, Jason Ramsey, Susan Fenton

We reviewed material from the blog and talked about Sharepoint. There was interest in seeing an demo and we agreed to ask Phil to arrange this. We also discussed getting demos of Zoho and the newest Meeting Maker running.

Mike talked about the Mozilla suite, including the new Eudora/Thunderbird blend. They have a calendar but it's not robust (Sunbird) and another more robust calendar (Lightening). We discussed the current calendars on campus, Meeting Maker and WebCalendar.

Matt asked about portals/single sign-ons.

It was agreed the group's official name - for now - would be No Name Group.

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http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2007/01/second_meeting.html http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2007/01/second_meeting.html Minutes Fri, 12 Jan 2007 08:10:47 -0500 Zoho Chalk this up to the whole "google it" research method... This was the first real looking product that I didn't already recognize, so I took a look. It looks interesting. Except it's called "Zoho", which is a stupid name.

Even though everyone keeps saying to look at features, look at it from a user perspective, I think we need to be careful about reliability, support, and our capabilities to run the darn thing.

Another thing that is going to hurt something like this is that it's so different, we're just begging for widespread user discontent.

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http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2006/12/zoho.html http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2006/12/zoho.html Products Fri, 22 Dec 2006 08:47:07 -0500 Free Consultant Possibility The presentation I attended was hosted by a Pittsburgh company, Allin Corporation. They are willing to do a free presentation or evaluation for us. They have a Communications and Collaboration Assesment they will conduct onsite that focuses on the ability to share, find, collaborate, provide remote access, and communication. They are a gold certified Microsoft partner.

Online meeting and collaboration tools
Document management, including profiling and version management
Content distribution to via intranet and data stores
Entrprise wide search capabilities

Sharepoint Portal Server


Phil

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http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2006/12/free_consultant_poosibility.html http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2006/12/free_consultant_poosibility.html Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:43:50 -0500 Microsoft Sharepoint Collaboration Software I recently attended a seminar that presented a brief overview on an collaboration software called Sharepoint. Its a MS product so it integrates with other MS products. It provides document sharing and tracking, ability to share links via calendars, it can utilize active directory to set file permission per user. It is advertised as a document management system. It keeps document history of revisions, it can be configured to notify users when a change has been made to a document as well as metadata being included with each document. Here's a link to some information, http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sharepoint/techinfo/topten.mspx
Here's a word document with a list of the services, http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/f/2/2f292511-8865-43ce-a241-5a4cc6dbfd03/WSSVersions.doc
There is also a Sharepoint Portal App and here's that info, http://www.microsoft.com/office/sharepoint/prodinfo/overview.mspx. There are some additional add-ons that may be useful, including a form tool that is supposed to be user friendly and can export data is database format, a report builder, SQL reporting services that will gather data from different databases and servers, Scorecard manager which allows a quick overview of a document, or projects progress, ability to autopublish reports or email status or update notifications.

Phil

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http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2006/12/microsoft_sharepoint_collabora.html http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2006/12/microsoft_sharepoint_collabora.html Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:07:23 -0500 First Meeting We had the first meeting of our group today. We discussed what it is the group should do and what types of products to look at. We came up with a starter list of products and services:

  • Google
  • MS Exchange (outlook)
  • MS Terminal Services
  • Samba
  • Document Management Systems (Hummingbird, OpenDocs)

We decided to look around for services that would integrate Email, File Sharing, and Calendaring, preferably through a web interface. If, along the way, we find products that do other cool features, or cool products that just do one or two of these things, we'll take a closer look at those, too. For the next meeting we are going to bring some names and info on some of the products we think should be considered further.

It was mentioned that a prime consideration of any product should be how well it integrates with current products on campus and/or how well it may integrate with future products, like a portal. The question of whether we should look at products with only employees in mind or whether we should also consider student needs came up, but no decision was made.

We also briefly discussed a name for the group. No name was chosen.

Due to the break and travel schedules, and the need for time to do some research, next meeting will be Friday Jan 12, 2007 at 8:30 am in the CC. In the meantime, feel free to post to the blog if you find a product or article that you think is relevant to the group.

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http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2006/12/first_meeting.html http://help.allegheny.edu/noname/2006/12/first_meeting.html Minutes Tue, 12 Dec 2006 13:28:10 -0500