STRIX

knowledge management portal
from a-z through ups and downs

Dobrica Pavlinušić

system architect

dpavlin@gbs-it.com

www.strix-portal.com

Content of this workshop

Knowledge management, buzzword, right?

Buy or develop the question is now...

What technologies to use?

Open Source technologies

Why Open Source something worth 1M EUR under GPL?

My portal in three easy steps

And much more (please, interrupt me!)

What is(n't) knowledge management?

So, what is knowledge management?

Managing knowledge

multinational companies

knowledge is kept only in people's heads

'if only Siemens knew what Siemens know'

if physical distance is greater than 16m people won't share knowledge by them selfs

connecting people

who is working on same type of job?

How to chose right solution?

Write functional specification

all wishes in table form (~100 in our case)

Ask vendors for offers

Evaluate responses

This approach solves problem
'this product is exactly what you need'

(which is true if you don't know your needs :-)

Functional specification

authorization and authentication

search (content, people, languages)

sitemap (navigation)

push of content (subscription)

multi-language

personalisation

news

discussions

documents

calendars

pools, questionaries

on-line meetings

integration with legacy systems

Available solutions (2003)

Vendors

Documentum

FERWEB

IBM portal

Oracle

SAP portal

Microsoft SharePoint (v1)

Knowledge management is more complex than document or content management

None of them satisfy all our requirements

In-house development

buy FERWEB CMS in source code and get developers to extend it to our (KM) needs

6 people and 8 months to go-live production, two years additional development

FERWEB: 20,000 LOC

STRIX: 150,000 LOC

KM is much more complex

than normal CMS portals

Strix components

Open Source

Linux

Apache

PHP, PEAR

perl

PostgrSQL

swish-e

htmlarea, FCKeditor

Commecial

MS SharePoint

MS Conferencing server

MS Active Directory

e-learning (moving to Moodle)

legacy applications

Strix development

source code in CVS, later in Subversion (using svk also!)

development, QA, production cycle

Request Tracker (500+ tickets)

Mailman for (internal) mailing list

Wiki for documentation

Using Strix day-to-day

two servers, three instances

development

private copy for each developer

every commit generates e-mail to list

automatic checkout (integration testing)

QA (another instance on production)

copy of production database (35Gb+) and files

apply changes from SCM

testing

production

We have tools, let's develop!

People, people, people...

Portal is based on modules (portlets?)

every developer owns 'his' modules

module testing is always done by someone else

hallway test, three clicks to first bug

Most of developers are in same room

bull-pan like environment

very good for fast initial development and brainstorming

very bad for support and development (phones!)

What did we end up with?

document publishing (with revisions)

suggest news (for users with administration privileges)

polls

people connect (knowledge, interests)

search (with support for Croatian language)

categorization of content in knowledge map

score content (used for search ranking)

...and a bit more

subscription to content (push using e-mail)

frequently asked questions (FAQ)

discussions (stand-alone and on different contents – news, documents etc.)

dictionary (and global with cross-linking)

calendar (with link to news)

organizational schema (from SAP HR)

useful links (with re-use of groups)

Strix connections

SOAP: Microsoft SharePoint, (own) BITRO travel expenses application

ODBC: Microsoft SQL server (e-learning application)

LDAP: Microsoft Active Directory – autohorisation and automatic user management

IMAP: e-mail status, login

batch import from other sources (SAP)

Web development hints

Developers should use one of standards compliant web browsers

Firefox

Mozilla

Opera

Fix bugs which affect only Internet Explorer

Result is portal which works in all browsers!

Performance

minimize round-trips from client browsers to servers (response < 3 s for all actions)

JavaScript (AJAX?) for user interaction

profiling logs to trouble shoot slow places (for modules and SQL)

usage of caching

session cache (per-user)

memcached (multi-user)

PHP accelerator (eAccelerator)

Puf!

What happened to Pliv@web?

From 1st of January 2005 PLIVA's IT department become separate entity

We have good knowledge management portal and strong in-house knowledge

Willingness to share our knowledge with community

Strix under GPL license is an answer

Debian GNU/Linux

PostgreSQL

Apache

PHP

Smarty

PearDB

FreeMind

50Mb .tar.gz + huge dependency list

installation CD-ROM

live CD (reboot)

Let's try...

GPL version on bootable CD

I want my portal, fast!

# vi /etc/apt/sources.list (remove testing/updates)

# apt-get update && apt-get install php4-pear

Road ahead

Windows instalation

using coLinux from same image as live CD

access data via filesystem (Fuse::DBI)

migration to different search engine (Hyper Estraier with P2P architecture)

even better support for semi-structured data (pgestraier)

language recognition using ngrams

automatic knowledge map categorization

KM pearls of wisdom

Knowledge management is depended on (captured) knowledge

critical mass in year or two from lunch

Portal is central place for knowledge sharing

connections to other systems

integration with other in-house application

custom developed parts for busseniss needs (using Dbgrid component)

Constant user education

Questions?

www.strix-portal.com

2004-04-20T20:34:19