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

Old VCP Features Tools Wiki - Mediawiki Blog - B2Evolution 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 Portal CMS User Login/Profile User Preferences Members List Messages Groups Tags Linker Rank Content Manager Templates

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

Why Drupal? Content management framework geared towards configurability and customization. Very large community (> 450K user accounts, > 2K 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

Drupal Module Evaluation VCP FeatureDrupal Implementation Login/Profile, User Preferences, Members List, Content Manager, Templates, Blogs, Linker, Search Drupal Core Groups, Tags, News feederQuality modules MessagesQuality modules for subscription-based notifications. So far, no direct user to user messaging. RankTall usage with UserPoints module. Implement Rank using Drupal ‘roles’. WikiNo 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, editFile uploads supported in core. Version control api with functional backends for CVS, SVN, Git, and Mercurial. Teleconference SuitePrimitive 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 DimDim. Web CrawlerGoogle Custom Search API. Mapping UtilityNew GMap module released Mar’09. Automated CallerNo modules. Might have to create a new Astericks wrapper.

Drupal-based VCP Prototype

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

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

Flash/Flex Integration Successful integrations can seemlessly integrate flash sites with a Drupal backend. Flash integrations by ThisByThemThisByThem  Pete Droge On-Line Experience  Sony’s MyPlay

OpenSim/SecondLife Integration Integrate a CMS with a virtual world. Make collaboration/group artifacts accessible in a virtual world using a Drupal backend. Drupal and SecondLife  Active Drupal Group on SecondLife integration.  Second Life Framework Module