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future reseArch directions
ing requests and generation dynamic content.
The portlets must follow a standard, which is
intended to allow the creation of portlets that can
be plugged to any portal supporting the standards.
This can be useful if in the future we decide to
change our system to another web portal, since
we could reuse this portlets.
Liferay has a wide list of portlets already avail-
able (currently there are defined more than 60).
It also provides integration with Alfresco, which
would be useful for the documentation module
we want to develop. Besides, it is a good portal
for small team collaboration. This is interesting
to share contents in different levels. For instance,
between the members of the same project, between
the members of INOVA, between different groups
inside INOVA, etc.
It also has a fine grained permissions system,
which is a very important characteristic, since part
of the information we work with is quite sensible.
The web portal is developed in Java, J2EE and
Web 2.0 technologies. Besides these technologies,
Liferay offers the possibility of developing portlets
in PHP, Javascript and many other languages.
This is one of the main reasons to choose this web
portal, since we could adapt the PHP modules that
we developed in Xaraya to a module in Liferay,
allowing a better integration.
To sum up, we think that the best solution for
the problems we will have to face in the follow-
ing months is to use the Liferay Portal to develop
our web system.
We are not sure yet if we will migrate the
portal we have already developed in Xaraya, or if
on the other hand, we will create a different web
portal to develop the new tools, maintaining two
different portals (Xaraya, for the tools we have
already develop), and Liferay for the new tools,
which are thought to be used as internal tools by
INOVA staff.
In the future we plan to include new applications
into the INOVA web portal, almost continuously,
since we have a lot of ideas to develop that we
think would be beneficial for users and staff, and
that would contribute to improve the quality of
private companies and of their projects. In the
following months, we pretend to add a funding
management system based on the profile and the
financing level of the customer's company. Also,
we are including a private section for customers,
to allow INOVA to share files and relevant infor-
mation with them, and a collaborative system that
allows the INOVA members to work online and
together in their projects.
Another module we want to develop is called
INOVA Project. This module will consist in a
planner module, to be used as an internal applica-
tion by the INOVA staff. With this module, they
will have the possibility to add the projects they
are working on and define the original planning
for those projects and apply resources to them.
While they develop those projects, they will be
able to see the current situation of it, if they are
delayed or not, if a task is taking too much time,
or if the resources applied are enough. To see it
in a graphical mode, they will have access to a
Gantt graph. Besides, the users will have access
to multiple reports, providing information related
with a project, with the staff workload, etc.
Other future work closely related with this one
will be a documentation module. The users related
to a project would have access to documentation
that could be relevant for them. Depending on
the type of user, they will have access to a certain
type of documentation. For instance, the customer
could have access to reports.
Another feature will be an alerts module. This
module is thought to send to administrators or
people with certain responsibilities e-mails with
information about different types of notifications.
For instance, problems in the web portal, infor-
mation about new documents, notification that a
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