Next Generation Virtual Collaboration Portal An Integrated OSS

Next Generation Virtual Collaboration Portal An Integrated OSS CMS-Based Solution

Old VCP Features Portal CMS • User Login/Profile • User Preferences • Members List • Messages • Groups • Tags • Linker • Rank • Content Manager • Templates Tools • Wiki - Mediawiki • Blog - B 2 Evolution • News Feeder - Gregarious • Version Control System - DVCS • Teleconference Suite - Flash/PHP Chat • Automated Caller - Asterisk • Mapping Utility - Google Maps • Search Engine - Lucene/Nutch • Web Crawler - Nutch

Open Source CMS Motivation l Old Implementation Home grown CMS using PHP and My. SQL u Brittle due to API and structural evolution of a myriad of integrated external tools. u l New Implementation u Leverage off an Open Source CMS with many needed features built in.

Why Drupal? l l l Content management framework geared towards configurability and customization. Very large community (> 450 K user accounts, > 2 K developers) Thousands of user contributed modules (> 3700) Top 3 in market share (along with Wordpress, Joomla) Recent Drupal Camp LA held at UCI, > 500 participants, see http: //2009. drupalcampla. com

Drupal Module Evaluation VCP Feature Drupal Implementation Login/Profile, User Preferences, Members List, Content Manager, Templates, Blogs, Linker, Search Drupal Core Groups, Tags, News feeder Quality modules Messages Quality modules for subscription-based notifications. So far, no direct user to user messaging. Rank Tall usage with User. Points module. Implement Rank using Drupal ‘roles’. Wiki No self-contained wiki module. However wiki functionality can be built on top of existing content types (usually Books) using wikitools, filters, diff, freelinking. wysiwyg editor option. Version Control (DVS) – upload, checkout, edit File uploads supported in core. Version control api with functional backends for CVS, SVN, Git, and Mercurial. Teleconference Suite Primitive module for chat. Drupal 6 Media sprint in progress. Better media management. Will include php stream wrappers for 3 rd party multimedia repositories, may allow integration with tools such as Dim. Web Crawler Google Custom Search API. Mapping Utility New GMap module released Mar’ 09. Automated Caller No modules. Might have to create a new Astericks wrapper.

Drupal-based VCP Prototype

Virtual Collaboration Portal l More emphasis on groups u u l Collaborators can form groups dynamically Groups facilitate communication and sharing of artifacts Features include u User Profiles u Blogs u Subscriptions/Notificati ons u Direct User to User Messaging u Chat u Forums u Video/Image Galleries u Publications (user/group) u Books (shared documents) u File upload u Web Links u Domain-specific search

Video Gallery of Virtual World Collaboration l Emphasis on storing and cataloguing videos u DVAS group is compiling a catalogue of videos that illustrate the current state-of-theart in virtual world collaboration.

Flash/Flex Integration l l Successful integrations can seemlessly integrate flash sites with a Drupal backend. Flash integrations by This. By. Them u Pete Droge On-Line Experience l u http: //droge. com/flash Sony’s My. Play l http: //myplay. com

Open. Sim/Second. Life Integration l l l Integrate a CMS with a virtual world. Make collaboration/group artifacts accessible in a virtual world using a Drupal backend. Drupal and Second. Life u Active Drupal Group on Second. Life integration. l u http: //groups. drupal. org/secondlife Second Life Framework Module l http: //drupal. org/project/secondlife