One of our next big steps for the IAM project is to work on building an on-line community. We have looked at a few hosted sites like ning.com and so on. But none of them met our requirements. Being that our project is all about identity, our most important requirement is any solution we select, must be able to use our Penn State credentials. We also want something that is open, so that members of other Universities can join the community.
Yesterday at our IAM TAG (Technical Architect Group) meeting we had a guest speaker, Cole Camplese. Cole gave us a number of good ideas on how to build a community. Right now we are looking at two software solutions, elgg and Drupal + Social Networking Modules. elgg looks interesting, but it does not look easy to integrate with WebAccess. However I did not spend much time investigating that. We do have Drupal up and are continuing to investigate that also. So far that is looking to very interesting. If anyone out there has other solutions that could meet our requirement, please comment on this post.
Yesterday at our IAM TAG (Technical Architect Group) meeting we had a guest speaker, Cole Camplese. Cole gave us a number of good ideas on how to build a community. Right now we are looking at two software solutions, elgg and Drupal + Social Networking Modules. elgg looks interesting, but it does not look easy to integrate with WebAccess. However I did not spend much time investigating that. We do have Drupal up and are continuing to investigate that also. So far that is looking to very interesting. If anyone out there has other solutions that could meet our requirement, please comment on this post.
I think Drupal would be a fine choice... it does have a bit of a learning curve, especially since one of its design principals is to have a number of small, lightweight modules instead of 'all-in-one' solutions.
Thus its built-in Forum module is very basic, but can be extended with modules like Advanced Forum, Comment Upload, Signatures for Forums, etc...
Eric