Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
soLutions And
recoMMendAtions
We must highlight that of course, the obtained
results are based in some general observations, and
users can not expect them to be totally accurate,
without a more specific analysis of the situation
of the company. It is for this reason that if a user
is interested in a more extended evaluation of their
needs, they will also have the option to contact
INOVA. With these toolkits, we expect users to
have a general idea about their situation in the
fields INOVA works in, in a fast and easy way.
We have thought in various possible solutions to
fix these problems we will have to face in future
months.
The first solution we thought of was to make
the migration of the modules they had already
developed to Xaraya. The problem about doing
so was that it was going to take a lot of time.
Another solution could be to migrate every-
thing that we had already developed in Xaraya
to a Java based system. The negative point in
this solution was similar to the previous one. We
were not going to take advantage of what we had
already develop.
The solution that seemed the best for our
problem was to find a system that would allow to
have modules developed in different languages.
We would have to make a migration, but the ef-
fort to do it would be much less than in any of the
other possible solutions, since we did not have to
rewrite everything, only adapt it to the new system.
We needed that system also had a good
documentation system or that it could be easily
integrated with one. Besides, this system had to
support the development of e-collaboration tools.
The problem we had then was to find a system
that would meet these requirements and the ones
that we had in the first place (robust, modular,
open-source, flexible, a good permissions sys-
tem…).
After analyzing different possibilities, we
finally opted for Liferay. Nowadays, this is one
of the leader open source portals in the market-
place. Liferay provides a unified web interface to
integrate data and sources scattered around many
sources. It can be defined as a built-in content
management system as well as a built-in col-
laboration suite. Its portal interface is composed
of a number of portlets. A portlet is user interface
software that is managed and displayed inside a
web portal. It produces fragments of markup code
that are aggregated into a portal page, process-
issues, controVersies,
probLeMs
One of the most important problems we have to
face is the fact that for the modification of the
web portal at the programming level, users need
a considerable amount of expertise in Xaraya. It
is not an easy-to-learn CMS. This is possibly due
to the wide range of possibilities it allows, which
makes it possible to develop new modules. This
causes that it took us quite a lot of time to develop
the basic functionality of the INOVA framework
(the nucleus of the web portal, the design of roles
and privileges, etcetera).
We are thinking in develop new modules in the
future, and to adapt some of the tools they have
already developed. The problem we have now is
that some of these tools are written in Java, and
the migration to PHP is quite tedious.
They also want to migrate their documentation
system to an improved one. For this, they want
to use a commercial solution that has not a good
integration with Xaraya.
Beside this, another problem we are facing
right now is that INOVA intends to implement
some e-collaboration tools. These types of tools
are not easy to implement in Xaraya, since it does
not exist any module that can give the functional-
ity we are looking for.
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