Presentation by IBBT on their MyIBBT project collaboration platform targeted at researchers - Amplexor Workshop - 27 April 2010

1. 27 / 04 / 2010

2. • Founded by Flemish Government in 2004
• IBBT = Software Research
Interdisciplinary - Question Driven - Valorization
17 research groups from all Flemish uni’s
Very different skills & backgrounds
Geographically spread
Many (200+) industry partners
Equally diverse in size, nature and
location

3. Typical IBBT project
• Consortium of partners & research groups
• Structure with sub-projects (with access control)
• Some Numbers:
• 2-5 industry partners + 2-5 research groups
• About 40/50 user per project
• A typical project takes 2 years

4. Practical problems..

5. Where’s that file?

6. No SSO (cross-project)
not integrated (GNU
mailman)
The quick fix Quickly set up in
2004/2005
Based on Typo3

7. A new plan... MyBBT
• IBBT Extranet
✓ User profiling & tagging
entirely new
✓ Knowledge sharing (cross project)
✓ Internal communication tool
• Project websites
✓ Document sharing existed, but...
✓ Calendar, milestones and tasks
✓ In-project communication

8. CoCoNut
• Internal IBBT project
• All researchers involved
• Strong focus on the user
• which tools are (not) being used?
• what criteria are important for user adoption?
• which tools will provide added value to projects?
• etc.

9. Coconut findings - IBBT culture
• 900 researchers & 900 industry researchers
✓ Lots of freedom / no control over OS nor browser
✓ Many early adopters
✓ Profiles from very high to very low tech. As much laggards :)
• Resultaat
✓ Open systems
✓ Usability is very important
✓ It should be state of the art.

10. Coconut Findings

11. Tender Q3 2008 - Choices...
• MS Sharepoint
• Most feature ootb, good templating engine, security++
• although ootb, still very expensive - licensing :(
• Cannot sell this to IBBT community
• Netlash
• Usability/ Interface experts, good feel with web-life, cheap
• Lots of customization necessary
• Alfresco
• Off the shelf pretty ok, UI is clear and OK, doc mgmt ++
• collab may be v1.0, J2EE : no in house knowledge.

12. Alfresco very simplified Office thinks it’s
MyBBT sharepoint
Alfresco Share
document
mgmt everything
Surf framework full-text indexed!
via
MS Office
CIFS/FTP
CMIS REST indexed & searchable
...
via
Use this Services
Lucene
straight away
REPOSITORY
documents / folders & metadata

13. Pro’s and Con’s Alfresco
Pro
✓extensibility of share (it’s possible!)
✓Lot’s of stuff out of the box
✓Alfresco is an excellent building block => futureproof
✓Open Source, but also: open philosophy
Con
✓extensibility of share (it’s not that easy!)
✓Share is a very young product => collab features are 1.0
✓Alfresco and timing.

14. Most important customizations
Fase I ( oct 2009 )
✓ Projects and sub-projects (access control)
✓ Automatic mailing in discussions forum
✓ Look and feel. (not: information architecture)
✓ User profiling / generic company entries.
Fase II ( Q1 2010 )
✓uservoice integration
✓Mailing list functionality (~basecamp alike)
✓Smaller bugfixes.

15. Proces & Timeline
• Development start: 01.06.2009
• Iterative development in 6
sprints (+alfresco 3.2)
• Usergroup of 40 researchers
spread over IBBT
• Using Google Forms as tool.
(all web-based)
• Deploy to Production: 01.10.2009

16. Proces & Timeline

17. Usage
• Currently: 60+ projects (ICON’s + a few specials like De
Krook, Ilab.O, BILA, EU, etc.)
• 400+ users
• Some bug reports (which is good!)
• Essentially : very well received, lots of request for new
projects.

18. The future.
• Fase I stopped, Fase II starts
• Being as responsive as possible (< 24hrs)
• Getting feedback loop going
• Bug postings are actively taken up
• Structural support for feedback (see demo)
• Essentially : continuous userX development
• Integration with ERP, more complex workflow stuff

19. Demo
• Demo...