Back | Translate: French | German  | Spanish | Italian

With the increased awareness of Knowledge Management amongst decision-makers about it's role in corporate profit making, more and more organizations are adding KM systems to their wish list. However, most KM solutions are out of the reach of a majority of SMBs.

This is where Open Source comes to the rescue. Open Source software provides an SMB with all the necessary tools to implement low investment (with high ROI) systems for a variety of the SMB’s management reporting needs.

Take KM for instance. Easy-to-use KM systems can quickly be setup using Open Source technologies such as Slash, Apache Web server, Perl, and the MySQL database. The main component for implementing KM using this software architecture is Slash.

Slash

Slash is the source code and database that was originally used to create Slashdot.org, and has now been released under the GNU General Public License. Slash is written in Perl, and is built on top of Apache and mod_perl. It requires a database backend, though the only well-supported database used with it is MySQL (more databases will become well-supported as time goes on; PostgreSQL support is already well on its way).

Slash is fast, scalable, and secure, as evidenced by one of the best test cases you could have, Slashdot.org. Through a plug-in system, developers can add functionality to Slash. Through themes and templates (which are written using the Template Toolkit), the look and feel of a Slash site can be customized.

Slash enables an organization to quickly implement an automated story-telling portal wherein its employees could read about new product announcements, details about the new employee’s compensation plan, or a how-to article from the help desk, etc.

However, Slash is not just limited to story-telling. Slash is an architecture for putting together web sites. It comes with functionality for posting articles, conducting polls, having discussions, and much more. Hence, it can easily be extended to include portal features.

In fact, Slash has a portal feature called a Slashbox. Each Slashbox can contain static information that must stay on the page, or it can be used as a portal to ever-changing content elsewhere on the Web (on the intranet, or the internet). A background process retrieves external content on a regular schedule to update the Slashboxes.

This portal feature can be used to display up-to-date statistics about sales, production, market share, etc., on the site' s home page. All you need to set up a Slashbox is a data source that can generate an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file. Most systems that can export text to a specified directory can be programmed to create such files.

First, Slash allows readers to comment on stories, creating an instant discussion forum focused on a particular topic. Readers can submit their own ideas for stories, which go into a queue for editing and approval before being published.

Second, a polling feature makes it easy to create and view the results of user polls. There is even a journaling system that would enable employees to create their own mini-Web logs detailing news in their part of the company.

Slash' s configuration options are another plus for intranet use. Stories can be categorized both by topic and by section for easy searching. Discussions can be enabled or disabled on individual stories; anonymous posting can be enabled or disabled, as can the entire user-moderation system. Authorship can be delegated in a larger company so that several individuals share the workload of generating content.

Knowledge Management systems from ISVs may seem prohibitively expensive to SMBs, however, with the availability of Open Source technology options such as Slash, businesses need not keep KM implementations on the back burner. In any event, the ROI from implementing customized Open Source based systems is higher than that obtained from customizing proprietary systems.

This article is copyright © 2002 Clinton Goveas.
Reproductions of this article must retain all copyright information with it and it's content must not be altered in any way.

Copyright © 2002-, Clinton Goveas. All rights reserved.