[Phpgroupware-developers] FYI, building a platform for research projects based on phpgw

[Olivier Berger]

Hi.

I just wanted to keep you informed of a development that we've just
started on top of phpgroupware (like Alex Borges did recently about the
e-learning platform).

We hope to do interesting developments that may benefit the whole phpgw
project, but we will probably give more details on that later on, when
we have specified these more precisely.

Don't hesitate to ask for more details if you're interested.

Best regards,

----
We are developing a platform which will be used to host research
programmes and projects.

This is done for a set of french higher educations schools and research
labs in the field of Telecommunications, where research is organised in
several major thematic programmes, which group the specific research
projects. In a typical research project, several Professors and PhD
students work, together with research partners (for instance working for
industry actors), during several years. Nowadays, research projects tend
to group in a single team individuals from various institutions, working
part time on the projects, using electronic communication tools.

This platform will serve two main objectives :

    * provide a central infrastructure to host information and
productions of the research programmes and projects, also accessible
from the Web and publishing some of the research results to the public.

    * provide a common collaboration platform for the research teams
working in the projects, in order to mainly improve communication and
collaboration between researchers working in separate environments, and
secure the electronic production of research artefact (documents,
publications, programs, etc.).

The platform will be built on top of several standard free software
applications (PhpGroupware, Apache, LDAP, PicoLibre), and will be
operated mainly through web interfaces. We expect as an outcome of this
platform's development to improve existing components in the
applications used, that will be contributed to the free software
community.

The project is now at an early stage, where we are specifying the
platform's desired features. So the architecture of the system is not
already determined.

It will most likely be built around a set of databases (RDBMS like
MySQL, and OpenLDAP directory) on top of which several applications will
be integrated. These applications will probably include PhpGroupware as
a standard API system, on top of which specific modules will be
constructed (programmes and projects management, collaborative
documentation and web site management systems, etc.), Apache for the
mod_dav WebDAV server, and Sympa as a mailing-lists manager. 

-- 
Olivier BERGER <address@hidden>
Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF
INT Evry (http://www.int-evry.fr)
OpenPGP-Id: 1024D/6B829EEC