GKP Web Portal
admin 
Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP) is the world’s first multi-stakeholder network promoting innovation and advancement in Knowledge for Development (K4D) and Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D).
GKP operates globally as well as in 8 regions: Africa, Central and Eastern Europe; East Asia; Latin America and the Caribbean; Middle East and North Africa; Oceania and South Asia. GKP members demonstrate ideas through projects on the ground; and they influence policy at a global level.
After an exhaustive search for a content management system (CMS) that would meet their needs, GKP’s web publishing tool of choice was Alcassoft’s SOPHIA cms.
The Enterprise Edition of SOPHIA cms allows for an unlimited number of websites to be independently managed under one license. This fits perfectly with their requirements, which include:
- Independent management of multiple websites
- GKP’s main site
- Regional sites, for each of the seven GKP regions mentioned above
- Event-specific sites
- Easy update of content across all websites
The SOPHIA Enterprise Edition allows for multiple types of content contributors, including writers, editors, website managers and administrators. Access rights of these content contributors can be set by the administrator to allow for complete control of updating of content for specified websites.
Additional Customisation of SOPHIA cms and Integration with GKPnet
Each regional website under the GKP umbrella shares its content with the GKP main site – the site gets seamlessly populated with content from all regional websites by the collection and collating of specific content.
The GKP portal (main and regional sites) also benefit from shared content from GKPnet, an external system which serves as the organisation’s virtual communication and collaborative tool.
Further integration of the web portal, powered by SOPHIA cms which is built in ColdFusion, with Java-based GKPnet includes: integration of the user database, and single sign-on. Access to the GKP websites is granted by CAS authentication, while access rights are controlled by Alcassoft’s Authoriser system. With the access rights and policies in place, user access rights are restricted based on their specified roles, i.e. web admin, content editor, content contributor, etc.
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Global Knowledge Partnership’s GKPnet
The Problem
Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP) is a global network consisting of members, partners, advisors and friends – each a distinct group of organisations and/or individuals with different levels of rights and benefits within the organisation.
The problems GKP faced was primarily in maintaining one comprehensive database of their network of participants to manage targeted one-way as well as two-way (collaborative) communications.
GKP’s global network of stakeholders meant that a large proportion of its correspondence, sharing and communication had to happen in a ‘virtual’ setting, in place of face-to-face meetings and discussions. To that end, GKP had been using various ‘web 2.0’ communication and collaboration tools available online, on top of regular email correspondence to address that need.
Some of the issues that emerged:
- Communication to and collaboration with users were done on an ad-hoc basis, via various third-party online tools that had no back-end integration with each other and very little control over who can do what
- Using various communication tools online that were either available for free or via paid subscriptions meant a huge headache in maintaining a manual database of users, very often resulting in duplication, and needing manual intervention
- There was no way to consolidate all information (including statistics, members’ profile information and interests, etc.) across all tools
- Users needed to sign in multiple times with (perhaps) multiple passwords to access the various third-party tools
- Need for massive storage space for email server due to
- overwhelming spam
- unchecked ‘reply-all’ habits of email users (meaning all email attachments, already considerable in size, would be sent and re-sent to all recipients)
- Mailing lists for targeted communications had to be maintained manually, often resulting in duplication or manual error in grouping, etc.
The Solution
After discussions with the client and identifying the direction they wanted to take in utilising communications and web 2.0 tools within their diverse and geographically dispersed members and users, Alcassoft proposed to develop and integrate various tools and software to provide a comprehensive solution suited to GKP’s vision of its virtual presence.
GKPnet Architecture
The solution would provide GKP with a coherent and integrated collection of tools and services, with user levels and access control, to be used by the various users and user types within the GKP virtual community – resulting in an invaluable repository of shared global ICT4D knowledge.
The system architecture:
- Central User Access Control & Management (the Core) – covers administration (of the entire system), user management and central user-related services (single sign-on, authentication and authorisation)
- System-wide common components and tools – includes common tools that are utilised by various applications and modules from the domain level
- Domain level Applications and Modules – individual modules (applications) to support the needs of GKP as a global virtual entity, i.e communication and collaboration tools such as project partnering, event calendars, repository of documents, etc.
- Interface level – provides extensions that are utilized by external systems as part of integration support
The list of tools custom-built for GKPnet:
- User Dashboard – at-a-glance view of activity from the various modules
- Interactions – custom interactive forum with chat, video upload, resource sharing,
- Survey – create, publish surveys, see statistics
- Groups – create groups, internal messaging, restrict access (to replace users’ common practice of mass emailing and re-sending attachments)
- File repository – upload / share files (resources)
- Projects – upload projects, project map, project matching
- Events – upload events, view by region, period
- Messaging – internal messaging, weekly updates, templates management
- User profile – contributions made, group membership, peers, shared resources, send message / email to
- Membership registration and management
- Elections
- Admin console
- Integration with GKP web portal and regional sites (cms) – single-sign-on to external cms, integration of database to external cms
The Underlying Technology
GKPnet was built using Java J2EE, utilising a number of open-source technologies and frameworks.
- Spring and Hibernate – are at the core of the entire system. Management of beans and object to database conversion are done via these frameworks.
- MySQL – database
- Apache Lucene – keyword searching and indexing of documents and content
- Eclipse – software development environment
- Tortoise CVS – source code versioning
- Security – ACEGI framework (also known as Spring Security)
- Authentication, Authorisation – CAS Single Sign-on was used to integrate all applications (including an external content management system built in ColdFusion)
Other technologies and frameworks used:
- JMS – Java Messaging for execution of “heavy” tasks
- Maven for dependency management
- Quartz for task scheduling.
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