* Metadot provides a range of portlets
Last week, I discussed a portal system and today I have another open source project that has impressed me immensely. The project is called Metadot, published by Metadot Corporation.
Out of the virtual box, Metadot provides a range of portlets that it calls “gizmos” that include discussion forums, file and content management, task and to-do lists, calendars, polls, FAQs, and personal Web sites. The boast is that anyone can use the system and Metadot’s graphic illustrates the interface features.
The extensive feature list includes group and user-based access control, a My Yahoo-like “My News Page,” e-mail notifications, image and link management, support for rich text editing (using the HTMLarea code from interactivetools.com), content management, version control, usage reporting, and support for site themes and templates.
Metadot runs on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows 2000 and Windows XP using LAMP software stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl) and can use Oracle as a database. Note that IIS is not used under Windows.
The minimal hardware configuration required is a Pentium III or AMD K6 running at 800 MHz or higher, 500M byte space for software installation, variable workspace for storing the Metadot uploads, and 256M byte RAM (Metadot specifies other configurations for specific service goals).
Metadot has an impressive list of clients that includes NASA Earth Sciences and The World Health Organization.
The documentation is extensive and being open source there is a lot of support and resources for developers. The Metadot user and admin guide is one of the best examples of documentation for a project of this sort that I have come across. Metadot also makes the guide available in both PDF and Word formats – the latter makes it easy to generate you own user documentation.
While Metadot makes a version available for free, it also offers a Business Edition that has been adopted by the likes of MIT, Schlumberger and The United States Navy. The Business Edition adds a SQL Reporter gizmo, e-mail newsletter generation and management, and a Web-based survey application.
Pricing for the Metadot Business Edition start at $2,000 for an annual subscription, which includes the Metadot Portal Server, installation and customer support, software updates and access to online training. Metadot also offers managed hosting.
