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Welcome to Geeklog
Friday, May 16 2008 @ 05:53 AM EDT

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Tuesday, January 21 2003 @ 10:32 AM EST
Contributed by: Tony
Views: 3,580

If you peruse the Got Geeked section of our site, you notice a lot of hobbyists posting on the accomplishments with Geeklog. Each week we watch in amazement at how the Geeklog userbase continues to grows and we appreciate how far we have come in the past few years.

However, this begs the question "Is Geeklog ready for Enterprise Action?". We have seen nor heard of very many uses of Geeklog in businesses or organizations. Is Geeklog being used in that arena? If so what are it's strengths and weaknesses on a more professional level? Also, if you do use Geeklog in this manner, a link or - in the case of intranets - a description of how you use it would be appreciated.

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Geeklog in Enterprises? | 23 comments | Create New Account

The following comments are owned by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 21 2003 @ 11:21 AM EST

I work in a division of large computer-manufacturing corporation. A few of us were sick of out inboxes being filled up with news story links (or worse still) copies of the actual stories. We'd then have to suffer the rants and opinions even if we had no interest in the story since we were copied on replies.

I had already set up a Linux box to capture and share requirements and use cases onine. I had been happy with the ease of use of PHP with Apache. We set up a new box (a very old Compaq machine) with a Debian installation and geeklog. In a couple of months over 100 stories have been posted. The number of contributors and the number of comments are both very small. We are still trying hard to train people to go to the site rather than their mail tool when they see news about our area of interest. We've even still had people send out mail when the story was already on our site. We are hopeful this will gradually change as we followup with each sender of spam and we've found that managers think it looks so impressive that they've really supported it.

Technically, it has been very easy to maintain, looks great, and has worked without failure. Being Open Source, we were able to add a little to the news feed plugin to make it understand a proxy to retrieve news through the firewall. A co-worker had looked at several alternatives and commented that the others were like launching the Space Shuttle when all you wanted to do was ride around the block. Great work geekloggers!

Personally, I've also been very happy with the level of installation and support documentation. It's not too much to read but enough to get running.

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: krove on Tuesday, January 21 2003 @ 02:18 PM EST

I work for a small european bike parts wholesaler of about 30 employees.

I setup Geeklog for use as our Intranet, providing a spot for employees to post procedural issues, discuss ideas, announce I.T. stuff, and track on-going support issues with our primary software, Microsoft Great Plains.

Since I put Geeklog in place, I have developed three small pseudo-plugins that tie into our workflows and better help keep track of information that otherwise was not tracked or even kept as record. For example, we have credit applications and account applications that come and go and must be approved or rejected. I have a small block on our Intranet homepage that shows the status of those apps (at least ones that have recently changed). Once an application has been approved or rejected, it is automatically moved to a history table. By having a single repository of this information, the salesmen who receive inquiries no longer have to call bookkeeping to check on the status of an application.

We ship via UPS, so I developed a UPS integration that collects data from the individual shipping workstations at the end of each day. The table in the database tracks customer id, shipping method, tracking number (complete with a direct link to UPS's tracking page), COD amount (if any), etc. All this is searchable, browsable, complete with the GL header, blocks and footer. I even developed a stats page to graph shipments by day, month, shipping method, etc.

My next major projects involves the creation of a product picture database that ties into our MS SQL Great Plains product database.

There are countless solutions that can be developed specific to a company, and GL is by far the best solution around which to develop such solutions. Thank you GL developers for such a great product!

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: muskrat on Friday, January 31 2003 @ 10:45 AM EST

I'm interested in learning more about the pieces you've added to GL. Why do you say "pseudo plugin"? What mechanisms did you use?

I'm working on using GL to display "dashboard" of meausures from various other systems in a company. Sounds like what you've done is in some ways similar.

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: cdriscoll on Tuesday, January 21 2003 @ 02:55 PM EST

I am an Assistant DBA and Assistant LAN Admin for a Municipal Utility Company in Cedar Falls, Iowa, which has about 130 office employees. We had an intranet project that died quite a few years ago, so we started planning for a new system. Our LAN Admin and myself searched other solutions in the form of weblog/web portal systems, and found that GL was the best for our needs. We use it for our entire Coporate Communications (weekly newsletters and announcements), Corporate Calendar, Job Postings, Classifieds, and Photo Gallery(using gallery v1.3.3) of special events. We have found that it is very simple for fairly novice computer users to maintain the content on our intranet.

We are running GL 1.3.7rc1 on RedHat 7.3 and are currently ordering a new server specifically for our intranet.

Keep up the good work!

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: geKow on Tuesday, January 21 2003 @ 03:38 PM EST

Hi
I'm just on may way to start an intranet like site for our companys (TV Production and transmitting Services, about 150 employes) "workers council" (that's how leo.org translates the german Betriebsrat ;-) I tried some open source portal/CMS systems and was impressed by geeklog as beeing made of "well formed" code and te user administration capabillities.

I still miss something, but I keep asking on the boards. What I really miss is something like a central documentation. I'm a bit involved in a replacement shell project, and we have made quite good experiences with a wiki as documentation base. (http://www.geoshell.com http://www.docs.geoshell.com)

I'm sure I will find some more things I miss, but I'll keep asking :-)

Keep on the good work

geKow

(please excuse my english ;)

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: tdahlia on Tuesday, January 21 2003 @ 06:35 PM EST

I'm using Geeklog at a federal government agency as my "WAN Manager's Page". Am just starting to learn ho to customize it to integrate my current pages of MRTG graphs, inventories, contacts, outage info, etc. What a great product!

---
TeeDah Boise Idaho

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: MLimburg on Tuesday, January 21 2003 @ 06:47 PM EST

I've started work at BAE SYSTEMS (used to be British Aerospace) as their Unix Operations Team Leader (wanky title meaning guy incharge of the *nix and dba gurus) and I've been looking at how to use GL in here.

Immediate problems I've encountered are:

Database .. Need an Oracle schema and db abstraction layer
Authenification .. Need to be able to talk to NTLM (or atleast LDAP which will be implemented in the next six months here)
WYSIWYG Editor .. People use FrontPage 98 (cough .. spit .. forces bile back into gut) to update their site, and getting the unwashed masses to use a textarea just won't happen

The organisational side of it is open to the idea of trialing it, but it would not be our Intranet, more a resource for Information Systems to communicate to each other, and to retain technical knowledge. This leads into a plugin I want to write for GL which does just that .. some form of knowledgebase.

I think most (all) of these issues (and more on top of that) will be addressed with GL2, but like most people, I want my cake now :) On the WYSIWYG side, EditSite Pro (http://www.editsitepro.com) may be one way to go .. professional javascript based editor, fully PHP (as an option), getting big reviews, and if we manage to score a $599US license for it, we can actually redistribute this legally. Hmmm, maybe we can get them to donate an uber-license or convince my Director to buy a copy and donate it ...

Once GL2 is up and running, I'm happy to assign some resources here (NetBSD maintainer and Oracle DBA guru) into the mix, as the Director of IS is quite interested the potential of GL2 ... now all I have to do is get my open source development mandate in writing ...

---
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, January 26 2003 @ 12:38 PM EST

Best way to implement multiple databases? ODBC!

I'd like to see Geeklog be one of the first of it's kind to offer ODBC as a viable option and not try to solve a problem that's been solved already. (ODBC is pretty easy to setup, even easier to setup on *nix that Windows, the horror!)

Check into it. It's suprisingly nice. Lets the user run just about every imaginable database they can think of, and they can run it anywhere they want too as well.

Food for thought. (It'll eliminate i want it to work with DB2/Oracle/Inno/etc. requests...)

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 21 2003 @ 08:47 PM EST

I run GL on my personal homepage as a portal for friends and family however I am in a process of starting up my own hosting company and so far GL is my first choice as the main page. I've tested out the login to the domain control panel which works as expected and the article posts will be an awesome way to inform customers of new products, changes or even down time. keep up the good work, you are certainly "easier" to use then PostNuke.

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 22 2003 @ 06:02 AM EST

I'm evaluating a number of MCS/Weblogs tools for a production internet site. It is not for our company itself, but for discussion of the use of the technology that we are developing.

We don't have a huge budget for the project, and I've always been an open source fan.

Right now GL is in the lead.

One thing that I noted is that all of the problems listed in Bugtraq for GL have been solved by sr1. Some of the competitors have open issues, some old. Keeping on top of security is critical for these users, and you appear to be doing a good job.

Collecting user info

Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 22 2003 @ 10:38 AM EST

Almost any enterprise community site (non-intranet) will be interested in collecting some sort of information on their users. I see the lack of ability to collect even basic user information as a serious barrier to acceptance in an enterprise site.

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 22 2003 @ 06:25 PM EST

I have Geeklog running for our intranet - graphics arts company with about 40 users. The biggest problem I have is geting people to use it. I have all our Macs set to open up IE to the Geeklog page on startup, but most users just quit without even looking at it. I think logging in turns people off a little, and nobody 'has time'. Sigh.

Otherwise I love it. As the IT guy it saves me from zillions of memos about computer stuff, and allows me to organize production and project notes (External Pages plugin). And tailor what the user sees by project groups. I'm looking to add a gallery for our clipart for easier access. A couple things I'd like to see:

- Use the server's user database for login and other user and group data (NetInfo for our Mac OS X Server, or LDAP).

- A file sharing plugin. One-line listings, multiple down/up load at once, dynamic content lists and file storage not tied to a database so our internal users can use regular file sharing for copying files. This would allow us to offer our clients an alternative to ftp for exchanging files. (I have yet to find a usable file sharing solution even separate from Geeklog)

- Some sort of content publication system - few here know anything about html, so I'm the one maintaining all the production notes.

Now, if I can just get our secretary to use it...

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: tomw on Thursday, January 23 2003 @ 09:34 AM EST

I use geeklog for two commercial websites. These websites also serve as portals for the employees. The permission system allows me to present two different, though combined, interfaces to these different classes of clients. The plugins I have created were created to meet some of the shortcomings I encountered for use like this.

My menu plugin allowed me to give customized options to different classes of users and even individual users.

The external pages plugin allowed me to keep track of documents outside geeklogs control.

The contact plugin allowed me to move the company contacts onto the web for easy access. I sometimes think that the PDA and its functions is the central computer application.

The stats plugin allowed me to keep better tabs on the website and its usage.

Things that I have not integrated into geeklog -- I have webcalendar (puts geeklogs calendar to shame), email and file sharing apps run on perl. Ideally these could be integrated into and become a part of Geeklog.

The major impediment that I see to usage in the enterprise is to move Geeklog from the Blog sphere to the CMS sphere.

[Rant on]

Here is what I would see as ideal -- one system that would handle all content types the same and could be used for document management, with versioning control and workflow applications integrated. So instead of having stories seperate from all other content, all content would be the same.

For instance, how about the ability to have a word document as the lead story, with the capability to comment and discuss it.

Binary files, pictures, business documents (or technically all mime types) should be handled seamlessly through one interface. When I press submit, I should be able to submit anything. A binary file and its description should not be handled different from a story. These distinctions are made to satisfy computer shortcomings not human beings. I do not have different file cabinets to keep documents and another for pictures.

The enduser should be able to submit content in any format and the program should handle it. It shouldn't matter whether the content is in ascii, html, word, excel, powerpoint, binary, any of the picture formats, video, whatever a computer can generate (within practical limits of course).

[Rant off]

TomW

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Tony on Thursday, January 23 2003 @ 09:42 AM EST

Ha, I think you just describe GL2

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The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: tomw on Thursday, January 23 2003 @ 11:03 AM EST

Can't wait

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, January 24 2003 @ 03:23 AM EST

Or Drupal, who as all of the above for nearly a year (since I started using it).

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, January 23 2003 @ 05:27 PM EST

with a quick mod to stories.php and a change of gl_stories, title from var128 in the database to TEXT , a little knowledge of HTML, there is no reason that your storie titles cant be Ms Office Documents, PDF's, Links, Or anything else.

You could either manually enter in the stories box
<a href=file/path/file_name>New File here</a>

or you could take the time and create a new stories submission interface.

P.S. Developers.

Could you please, for the SANITY and love of god, do the following.

One. Template out everything in lib-common. Its really not a lot. Things like COMMENT, button stiles, ectra. Its a pain to VI the file and change it everytime you create a Nifty New version, thats faster.

Two, caching. Not everyone has a brand new P4 or AMD XP 2600 with 1 gig of ram to play with. Not everyone has happy go lucky hosts who think memory or io usuage above .001 percent is okay

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Tony on Friday, January 24 2003 @ 04:11 PM EST

Templating has been an ongoing task ever since I started it. 98% of Geeklog is templated with the noted exception you listed and, of course, usersettings.php. Each release of GL attempts to take a chunk out of that and eventually we should be 100% template driven.

Caching solutions aren't easy. Worse yet, they introduce a number of support headaches when TTL's are too generous. I'm not saying that caching would not help but adding it needs to be carefully thought out. Why not start with some sort of PHP accelerator? That would be a path of least resistence at this point. The problem with this concept and GL2 will be dual webserver support. We will consider ways to do this and we are open to suggestions.

---
The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, January 23 2003 @ 04:29 PM EST

Coming from a company that has designed a competing product, MetaDot. (www.slb.com) Schlumberger definately sees the need for a content management system but decided to design one in house. For other Energy Service Companies without the funds to look to a custom solution I believe that either Metadot or Geeklog would be excellent solutions for knowledge management. By using this tool companies could be less reliant on people who store all the information in their heads. Both Metadot and Geeklog are open source product but the ability for more MetaDot to provide consulting and hosting services with their product is one major strong point to the fiscal feasability for the products to develop, also the backing of a major multinational helps too. Personally at home I run geeklog at http://www.ispider.ca but that is more a non profit venture than anything else.

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, January 23 2003 @ 08:24 PM EST

I am the webmaster of an information security organization. I have been evalutating using GL for our public presence for about two months. At this point, I am evaluating the code as well as the development philosophy. I like the features, but have been wondering what the future holds. It seems that the vast majority use GL for personal blogs versus organizational or enterprise environments. I am in favor of trying to meet the needs of everyone, however, I would be disappointed if personal homepage-ish features made their way into the core distribution.

As it is now, I consider GL ideal to reach my cluetrain utopia. I hope the difference between GL and the other guys is clear direction and clarity of intended audience.

Keep up the good work.

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Tony on Friday, January 24 2003 @ 04:06 PM EST

It's funny you mention this. The future, GL2, is quite simple. You can think of GL2 as merely a CMS kernel. It, of and by itself, accomplishes nothing. It is just the engine for content that controls authentication, authorization, user administration, site administration, internationalization and a module API that exposes these features. Thus, GL2 by itself is useless until you install a module (i.e. article module, link module, CRM module, etc). How professional or personal the site is will be based completely on the modules you choose to install. Other than that, Gl2 is a big threading engine allowing anything to be tied to anything else (i.e. you can attach a poll to an article, a document to a comment, etc). So, if you will, imagine a home page where more than just stories can appear.

---
The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, January 27 2003 @ 10:21 AM EST

I recommend you contact eWeek and ask if the author of one of these articles could review Geeklog and provide some feedback since they've evaluated other CMS software.

Open Source Provides Viable CMS Options

Content Services

Adding versioning control to GL would be a nice feature. Another thing to consider is how well does it handle heavy traffic. It may be worth looking into different caching technologies to see if this area could be improved. I've read Movable Type does pretty well. I don't know if anyone has stress tested GL.

Geeklog in Enterprises?

Authored by: jalmada on Friday, January 27 2006 @ 07:37 PM EST

I've been a user of Geeklog since version 1.38. I've gotten so used to using it for personal and blog use on the outside that when we needed a simple department CMS within my own company, a large Aerospace firm in California, I naturally thought of Geeklog to solve the problem.

What I ended up doing was to settle on using MySQL 3.23 on a large Windoze server, GL 1.3.11, and to configure a standard configuration image that we use to crank out configurations of servers with. Our customers love it and it is quite simple to train and turn over the portals to our user base - Takes all of 1 hour in most cases. We've got about 8 of them running now and it looks like we'll get quite a few more. I can't wait until 1.4 is ready, I'll upgrade all of them at that point to get the latest features and the WYSIWYG story editing capabilities.

We also integrate custom Flash headers into the standard image we use. The Flash headers truly dress up the product. We use the stock "professional" layout along with this customization. It looks good, is very quick to alter using a standard checklist we've developed, and best of all, costs $0.00.

And yes, I manage a large SharePoint portal and a gaggle of other technologies. Our GL sites are more popular and quick to get into the field than any of the other so-called content management solutions...

Jon

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Jon F. Almada

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