Category: ProGET

A propos de la plate-forme de travail collaboratif ProGET

De retour des JRES 2005

Je suis de retour des Journées Réseaux (JRES) 2005, qui se déroulaient à Marseille, avec, je crois, plus de 1200 participants, où nous avons présenté notre papier sur l’intégration d’applications libres pour la réalisation de la plate-forme ProGET.

J’ai apprécié les présentations qui étaient d’une très grande qualité, en général, et démontrent une très grande professionalisation dans les équipes en charge des systèmes d’information et des infrastructures associées dans le monde de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche.

Le logiciel libre tenait une grande place dans les exemples de solutions présentés. Pour de nombreux acteurs, même si les utilisateurs finaux restent en deux environnements, Windows et GNU/Linux, l’infrastructure, elle est massivement équipée de solutions libres.

N’ayant pas suivi les développements récents des SI universitaires, j’ai été assez impressioné par la capacité apparente de mutualisation réelle des développements réalisés par les équipes de différentes universités. Au-delà des inévitables problèmes d’organisation ou de personnes, qui semblent avoir été résolus, on dirait bien qu’un certain nombre de projets libres, par exemple dans le domaine des Environnement Numériques de Travail (ENT) sont bien partis pour un développement collaboratif entre plusieurs équipes, et une diffusion dans de nombreux sites. Cela devrait permettre d’assurer une meilleure qualité des développements, une certaine généricité, et à moyen terme, une maintenance plus facile. Reste que ces projets seront plus ou moins franco-français pour la plupart… il y a quelques progrès à faire pour arriver à la dimension de vrais projets libres “classiques”. Mais je suis quand même assez bluffé, je dois le dire ;).

Vous pouvez consulter les actes des JRES avec l’ensemble des papiers et des présentations (Update : des vidéosde nombreuses conférences sont maintenant en ligne).

Edukalibre and ProGET… two complementary systems

I went to the OSS2005 conference to present a paper in which we describe the work that we have done on the internal ProGET application (as part of the PFTCR project), a collaborative work environment for researchers at GET, based on libre software. In this paper we also outlined a strategy for contribution when using libre software, but that’s not the point here (no extensive description of ProGET is already really available, but the slides for our paper describe the main items : features and architecture).

At the same conference, a paper about the Edukalibre project attracted my interest, since the tools developped in this project are quite close to what we have or would need in the ProGET platform.

In ProGET we address users being researchers in a higher education school who want to work in a collaborative way with help of a web platform. In Edukalibre, the goal is to allow the development of educational resources in a similar environment. Both project address more or less the same users, then. And both projects are done by teams having a strong competence in libre software (and a commitment to this paradigm).

The features are very similar too : in Edukalibre, the documents repositories are using subversion for revision management and WebDAV (and other protocols/tools) for access to the documents. Whereas ProGET doesn’t yet use version management, we also provide a DAV interface, and subversion indeed was one option we were considering for doing version management in future evolutions. In ProGET we support some levels of confidentiality with respect to who gains access to which parts of the repositories, whereas in Edukalibre, everything is public. And we implement this through LDAP-based auth, when Edukalibre considers using this too for the next evolutions of their tools. Both projects are integrated with other groupware tools : Moodle components for Edukalibre, and PhpGroupware components of ProGET. When in ProGET we don’t recommend any document format, and include a wiki engine, Edukalibre supports mainly OpenOffice and DocBook documents, and enforces their use, and includes automatic conversion tools : both approaches to documents are really complementary.

Whereas what was done in ProGET is mainly internal, and thus not really a libre software project, we would very much like to be able to publish what we have done as libre software as a new version of the old PicoLibre platform.

As a conclusion, both systems are very similar and would probably benefit from collaboration, or at least offer to tools which can inspire each-other. Next step for me will be to test edukalibre 😉

Slides of our paper at OSS2005

I’m back from OSS2005 in Genova (more detailed report to come), where I’ve presented our paper “Why and how-to contribute to libre software when you integrate them into an in-house application ?”. Here are the slides I’ve presented in the 15 minutes slot (too short ;). For a longer version, you may have a look at the presentation made at FISL 6. Or of course, you can also read our paper 😉

Why and how-to contribute to libre software when you integrate them into an in-house application ?

In the paper titled “Why and how-to contribute to libre software when you integrate them into an in-house application ?” (which is now available online), to be published in the forecoming proceedings of the OSS2005 conference (Genova, Italy, 11-15 july 2005), we draw from our experience on the projects PicoLibre and ProGET, to explain how in-house applications can be built around existing high level libre software programs. We also describe the issue of long-term maintenance of such in-house platforms, and we propose a strategy for contributions to external libre projects, in order to help solve the maintenance issue.

Feel free to comment on this paper in this post.

Update : the full proceedings of the conference have been put on-line. Check the details from http://oss2005.case.unibz.it/