(intro: Even if I have allready read and browse lots of forums I am still very newbie in the art of posting and asking questions. If you answer me feel free to give me comment about the way I should express better myself. afterwards this post covers a list of offer proposition that I am not yet sure to make follows up, i realy think that will depend of the feedback I receive, so please if you think some of all that fuzzy stuff worths it, tell it to me!)
 
Until a few weeks ago, I only had quickly tested phpgroupware (discovered in the release package in Debian 3), but no direct or professional motivation pushed me to use it in a "production context". Now, I am working in a cooperation program in Indonesian and actually my main (and probably last) task now is to set up a LAN for a Technical Engineer School in Makassar (www.poliupg.ac.id : completely unmaintained and outdated... I try to motivate people here to live it up again, but my work is inside and it is enough).

It is about 500 hundreds computers of many kind (most are still old PCs running Win9x, but also older, newer and linux boxes), the network (now very more secured than before) may still very exposed to attacks and viruses. For these reasons, the architecture is completely linux-server based and web applications oriented. With a LDAP register (managing uniform user authentication, Samba PDC, adressbook,...). The goal in large term is also to "liberate" the school of "propritary licensed programs very difficult to licensed but easy to install".

The first candidate for the groupware : was obvious to me: phpgroupware (larger than tikiwiki and C°, LDAP authentication support apparently working well, translatable with an integreted tool, ...)

Now we are still installing testing versions but very soon (theorically max 1 month !!!) it should be launched. The different restrictions and interests of this current context motivated me (and a little bit more people, but I still do not know how much they are reliable) to dress the following list of enhancement that could be nice (and that I will be happy to perform, but certainly with little help of other developers...). Here are the points of interest that we will propose to open:


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- Indonesian Translation:

We saw that some people allready corrected the "in" code to "id" standard one for indonesian language. As the average english skills of the future users of the groupware are quite worse than my own (so you can easily imagine the quality of english i am speaking about... if you still understand what an expatriated swiss-french try to write down...;-) it is planed to translate every populated applications. the most prioritary will be : calendar, adressbook, messenger, inventory, manual. but we hope that the nice "translation tool" will help to perform a large translation of the phpgw. The questions are:
a) is there any collaborator allready working on Indonesian version?
b) Is there a protocol to respect for official translation?
c) By now, I can not guarantee that a professor of the Polyte

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- Inventory: maintain the project (see post: )

a) what is the status of the development of this application?
b) do you need developer?

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- Documentation:

a) We stated that the different documentations still need lots of help, and I hope that I should be able to fill some chapters... but no more --> any recommandation of where to start, what to do? for example: I can be interested about documenting LDAP installations and configurations aspects, but ATTENTION i do not feel expert at all...
b) I can translate to french (and maybe motivate people for spanish, catalan, indonesian,...)
c) i have not yet written to decarlo13atcomcast.net because I am still uncertain about how much time I will be able to give, and about the prerequisite expected. please comment...

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- Human Ressource Generalization/Specialization "à la carte"
This the most experimental part of the post, and it is just some ideas that I will be happy to "brainstorm" with you. so if there is interest (or precedents...) please open a new section or refer to an existent one. Actually this is allready out of the goals of the installation for this school, but I am so frighten to see poor experienced PHP programmers here, convinced they can develop a Information System to manage the HR of the hole school! I allready had to fight to convinced them to use existing solutions to manage their calendar! Now, it is right that the informations about their staff or their students is quite personalized (and it is not just possible to map to a classical school model, believe me, the organization here is completely crazy). So the idea is to present phpgw as the famous Information Center they need. Now, the first option will be to develop an Ad-Hoc module concentrated on the management of the people there. Looking at this point, it is obvious that any kind of organization (since they divide their collaborators in more than 1 cathegory) can be intersted to insert its own classification terms.

the idea: create a framework that allowed the administrator (or even the users) to expand the associated information about the people recorded in the HR. the fields, tables will be dynamically created, some rendering toolkit will also be prepared to create dynamically the resuult page (with a tool for "visual edit" of the web page result). the idea : give an OOP "user-friendly" tool that will translate the classes and attributes defined by the user in new relational tables that will record the information. it will not be "impossible" to manage, as we restrict the capacity of imagination of the end-user giving him only some meta abstractions.

example: we want to manage students with their different classes and grades.
the HR-entry will be extend with a structure to record the list of classes

I do not pretend that such a module can make process of these data. but first give a common interface to fill the data in and browse it. Automated process, Special data presentations, ... will still tasks to perform by specialized applications.

I know this not enough to be clear, but may be enough to open discussion. actually I have been several times thinking about these kind of framework but, i have not yet found an application that give the response. beside that, i have not yet made any deep investigation to find research group or development team working on similar concepts, I humbly think that I cannot be the first to speak about that... I will try to come back!

(sorry, it's so late, i don't have time to review again...)