Vantaa Intranet Toolkit (VINTKIT)

Version 0.2 30.05.2000



VINTKIT is a collection of PHP-scripts that hopefully help you 
to make an Intranet pilot for your company. If you try them out 
please send comments to vintkit@users.sourceforge.net. 

If we know that somebody really uses this stuff we might try to make 
new releases. 

Of course, all support is welcome and if you're willing to participate
in developing this package please don't hesitate to send mail to us.

Please, keep in mind that this is 0.2 release. It works, but it's not
polished.


THE TOOLKIT CONSISTS OF:

- Intranet cover page,
which displays the latest company news and a menu to access Intranet 
applications

- Telephone directory
where the telephone operator can input telephone names and 
telephonenumbers

- News application,
for the communications department to publish company news 

- Document management
to publish scanned documents through the Intranet. Document pages are saved
as GIF. Every document has certain index-fields.

- File browser, which allows the webmaster (or other users) to
upload static content to the web server and to use normal file
operations (copy, rename, delete)

- Journals application where users can join magazine circulation
lists

- Vacation application where users can put their vacation times

- Exhibitions where users can see upcoming trade shows

- Contrib applications that we didn't have time to write even
the simplest installation instructions but they are there just in case
somebody finds them useful.
 
These applications may be trivial to you PHP gurus out there, but
they sure convinced our management to base our Intranet on Apache
and PHP. Currently this release is only a fraction of our intranet
applications.




THE BENEFITS FOR YOU AS THE INTRANET ADMINISTRATOR ARE:

- Because the PHP-scripts are so short and simple the customisation and
maintenance of applications is easy. Also, it's easy to take only one or two
components from VINTKIT to your own use if you want to.

- Database consists of only one table per application so importing and exporting data if needed is easy.

- In our company the applications have made the 'webmaster bottleneck'
(which some people call the webslave bottleneck) a non issue. Information
producers can update the databases with their browsers. The user interface
is very simpel, thus less support is needed.

- Performance is good even on low end PC hardware, which reduces cost and
increases scalability.

- All the data is stored in MySQL database for easy integration to other
applications. With little effort you are able to use commercial databases,
such as IBM'S DB2 or Oracle.

- And of course all the software is free.

PHP helped us to build our intranet ahead of timetable and under budget.
We have been happy with flexibility and the amount of administrational burden.




NOTE ABOUT SECURITY:

High security has not been a design objective for us. Our intranet is 
used for internal use only and it does not contain higly sensitive
material. There are some security issues that we know of
and probably many that we don't know of.

Besides this free software and it is provided as-is with no warranty.
You can do with it what you want but if something goes wrong don't
blame us. 




REQUIREMENTS:
1. Apache webserver (www.apche.org) with PHP-module (www.php.net)
2. MySQL database
3. Javascript and CSS (Cascading style sheets) capable browser.

Make sure you have a recent PHP package. 4.0 is the most recent at time 
of writing this. Make sure you install PHP with at least MySQL support
(compile time option) and if you're planning to connect to other databases 
compile support for them also. There's just too many options to be listed 
here, ranging from GD (on-the-fly gif graphics) to PDF and LDAP support.


HAVE FUN!

VINTKIT TEAM:

Aki - coding
Janne - filemanager
Mans - contrib apps
Leo - Coordinating & documentation
