In the course of their activities, the 700 employees at Waterwegen en Zeekanaal (W&Z) in more than ten departments and working in different sites, create a growing body of content: contracts, cases, nautical maps, project documentation, reports. The information is currently managed in a traditional file system divided over a dozen servers, on personal hard drives and in mail boxes.
Redundancy, outdated and inconsistent information are rife. To deal with this growing problem, W&Z decided to create an intranet with combined content and document management capabilities. In the next phase, the customer requested an internet site in the same content management platform.
Solution
Panoptic proposed OpenCMS, a J2EE-based open source content management system. Already in its fifth version, OpenCMS offers the maturity and functionality comparable to commercial CM sytems such as template based authoring for non-technical contributors, versioning, check-in/check-out, scheduled publishing, metadata support, XML-support and an extensive administration interface. Thanks to the open architecture, we were able to develop generic extensions for W&Z, including:
- Integration with Lucene, an open source search engine, and development of Office document parsers
- A module generator, which automatically generates all Java classes and input forms for the content types, based on an XML-description
- An LDAP-connector, to re-use the customer’s exiting user and user group information.
- In-context editing functionalities, allowing users to upload documents and add content such a news items directly via the site.
- Content is stored in MySQL, an open source database, and the solution runs on Apache/Tomcat, an open source application server.
The development of the project took ten weeks, including the generic extensions. Prior to that, we analysed the information and functional needs at the different W&Z departments, compiled in a specification document which guided development. A static mockup of the intranet allowed us to discuss the results of the analysis with the departments more easily.
Partner:OpenCMS
