Re: [school-discuss] Metadot and MIT

[Michael Dean <michaelldean@sbcglobal.net>]

if one wants to compare CMS/portals go to cmsmatrix.org.  I have some 
problems with metadot, which I have looked at in detail for smaller 
schools.  First, it is written in perl, which when it scales is very 
slow.  Second, you need mysql or oracle to run it.  Fine for big 
universities, who usually have Oracle, but if you want an open source 
solution in your middleware as well as user applications not so fine.  
Mysql also costs money, and is not a comparable (not as good) database 
to either Oracle or postgresql.  second, it does not provide an audit 
trail, no content approval, requires use of LDAP for authentication, 
admin is not notified of problems, does not run under SSL, has no 
commercial certification or documentation, no online help, does not 
provide a structure for third party developer add-ins, no drag and drop 
content, no undo, no advanced caching, no database replication, no 
content staging, no affiliate tracking, no deployment as a package, no 
way to trash old content, no web statistics, no web based translation 
management, no workflow engine, no ftp support (even scp), is not WAI 
compliant, no webdav support, not xhtml compliant, no cgi support, no 
interface localization, not metadata support, is not multi-lingual, or 
wiki aware.  no chat, no classifieds.  No contact management,  no data 
entry, no database reports, no groupware, no guest book, no bug 
reporting/help desk, no HTTP proxy, no surveys, no tests/quizzes.  The 
keyword here is NO!

One of schoolforge's affiliates was totally trashed last weekend by a 
porn marketeer who placed 2500 links to porn sites in the comments 
section of every artricle about school software.  This is why content 
approval and moderation is so important in your software, especially in 
grade schools.  Also, one would want to audit who does what on your 
site, because trashing your site with porn in the US is a felony. 
Daniel Guermeur wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> Just to announce that Metadot Portal Server software has a new 
> university user: MIT.
> Metadot is used by numerous schools and university including Berkeley, 
> Pace and many orders for their intranet, extranet or organization 
> websites. Metadot provides content management, collaboration and 
> portal (like My Yahoo) functionality. The key differentiator is the 
> extreme ease of use so that non technical users can manage the content 
> without asking their busy IT person to help.
>
> See live sites at:
> http://www.metadot.com/index.pl?id=2528
>
> Daniel
> --
> Daniel Guermeur - daniel@metadot.com
> www.metadot.com - Be Part Of The Open Source Revolution