Re: Drupal, WebGUI, Plone, BLOG, RSS, et al....

Well, there's the magic question, isn't it? But even though the  
software solutions are middling at best for general systems, I think  
the larger issue is with company culture. Even the best of systems  
don't have good returns if the staff aren't prepared to jump in. I  
remember skimming an ACM article about this very problem.

The way I see it, people come to match.com - match.com doesn't come  
to them. And they have very, very fixed taxonomies - age, gender,  
location, job, etc. These systems are easier for us as developers,  
but I'm not sure they're the best for getting regular users to really  
invest in the system.

Now if these systems can hook in to already present culture, but add  
on the other CMS/KM/organization tools/what-have-you, then I imagine  
the acceptance rate would be much greater. One thing I remember  
reading about in the Civicspace project (Drupal fork for NGO/ 
political communities) was bringing in a mailhandler so that web  
forums and mailing lists were integrated. This might be integrated  
into Drupal in the upcoming 4.7. This combined with the new  
folksonomy system (love or hate the word, I suppose it's catching on)  
might lead to reasonable gains without forcing users to change their  
habits quite so much. Add a nice, easy-to-use Wiki system, and that's  
a powerful system without quite so steep of a learning curve.

But of course, every system is different, every need's different. But  
I suspect if these organizations have a chronic lack of organization,  
new tools will only go so far. And as you can tell, I'm very  
interested in this, but I'm still just skimming the surface of  
present knowledge.

Adam

On 2005 Sep 26, at 7:49 PM, Richard Ford wrote:

> Just curiosity and leading towards helping organisations with their  
> chronic lack of ability to organise, classify, meta data create and  
> relate documents and knowledge - companies really are dumb with  
> this respect.
>
> I too think that a knowledge management solution is different to a  
> content management.  Content is content - knowledge goes a bit  
> further and is the extraction of useful info (knowledge) from  
> stored content.  So the ability to do taxonomies and meta data  
> classifications and input a strict corporate vocabulary are ideal.   
> I am thinking of software like Trim (Tower Software, AUS) and the  
> like.  A system that is both easy to admin and setup and can be  
> used in its most basic form as a content management system (Web GUI  
> really rocks in this regard and is soooooooooooooooooooooo cool) -  
> but also allow me the chance to index the files, find relations and  
> track how users search and interact so that the system can be more  
> like a knowledge management system (Expert System) and less like a  
> content management system (decision support)..
>
> I mean we have yahoo personals, match.com and the like.  We have a  
> billion systems to look for and find relationships on this planet -  
> where are the ordinary to access ones for SME's that can do the  
> same magic for their gigabytes of corporate knowledge that is just  
> sitting there wasting platters?
>
>
>
> On Mon, 2005-09-26 at 10:24 -0700, Adam Lowry wrote:
>> On 2005 Sep 25, at 7:21 PM, Richard Ford wrote: > Is there a  
>> comparison to be made between plone and drupal? Or WebGUI? > >  
>> When is something a real CMS (Vocabulary, Taxonomy, FOAF, Meta >  
>> Structures) and when is it a fancy blog, HTML content management >  
>> system? > > Cheers, > RF. I don't know WebGUI, but I used Plone a  
>> bit at Exoweb and Drupal for my personal projects. They're both  
>> full CMSes; but what is real and what is not is a bit subjective.  
>> Better to outline what you really want it to do and compare  
>> against the others, like nEO and Qiu Yu said. If you're not  
>> looking for as large a system as what Craig talked about, I'd  
>> recommend Drupal. You can get it running quickly, but the  
>> infrastructure is solid, so extending it can be simple. I've heard  
>> of people adding modules to communicate with more advanced backend  
>> systems, so you can leave the fast interface end just in mod_php.  
>> And although I've never maintained the system myself, after seeing  
>> people have so much trouble with Plone, I wouldn't recommend it,  
>> even though I think Python >> PHP. What kind of things are you  
>> wanting to do with the system? Adam, not in Beijing any more

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