Hi everyone, I've been testing out a few different systems that various committees, projects, etc. pointed me to and am ready to install them on osgeo1.
The applications in question are:
* Moodle: http://moodle.org/ - course management system for online learning (for Edu Com), already in use by some EduCom curriculum contributors, comes with good recommendation and familiarity by others.
* Open Conference System (OCS): http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/ (for Conference Com), to improve committee level access for event planning, session tracking, file management, maintaining a legacy of conference information, etc. To serve minimally as an easy way to handle preliminary planning, hosting some files, etc. Potentially as a year-to-year system for tracking our main events.
* Open Journal System (OJS): http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/ (for Journal project), to improve the set up, review, creation, publication, indexing, etc. of OSGeo Journal. This is primarily a workflow application that helps tie together various stages of journal preparation.
All of the above are stable, mature projects built using, in our case, MySQL and PHP. While it is theoretically possible to mirror their functionality using custom Drupal development, I believe that is not the best approach, nor feasible at this point in time. There are others I've talked to that have a similar set up as ours, Drupal, plus these other apps, plus LDAP and mediawiki.
They also all support LDAP. There is also some work going on to supply a php-based single-sign-on for these projects. My experience using them has also been positive - the systems are highly responsive, easy to install and compact in size. But the biggest impact will be when it has made it easier for others in our community to maintain the content in their systems.
If anyone has any questions, concerns or issues they want to discuss before I proceed on installation, please let me know. I would like to start this soon.
Tyler