By Frederick Noronha
8 March, 2006
In a carefully-planned operation that took more than a year to complete the British charity Oxfam switched three thousand users from using its proprietary collaboration platform to one which is closer to their mission: volunteer-created Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS).
Oxfam’s deputy international support manager Fran Boon explained to Frederick Noronha how the switch-over was achieved over the past two years.
To manage its volunteer efforts in the developing world Oxfam uses a callborative Intranet platform that serves around 3000 users and 100 authors. That platform was previously built on proprietary software using Microsoft’s IIS, ASP and FrontPage.
“We migrated this system to the LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Php) stack [but] to make the migration as easy as possible we used Mod_Frontpage, an Apache module which allows the Frontpage client to be used,” says Boon. He says that by separating the authoring component from the backend they eliminated the need to retrain editors.
They then put Apache at the front of the system so all the users ‘talked’ only to Apache. The DNS also pointed only to the Apache server and Apache did the work of deciding which bits of content would come from itself, and which bits of content it would proxy and get from the legacy server. “So we achieved a seamless migration for the users,” says Boon.
So what sort of problems did the switch-over cause?
One was case-sensitivity, says Boon. GNU/Linux, like its Unix predecessor, tends to be case-sensitive. “We used the Apache module called mod_speling — which allows people to misspell the URL a bit, and yet gives you the page which it thinks is right,” says Boon, explaining their workaround.
Another challenge, he says, was bookmarks. “You can’t go around 3000 PCs and edit bookmarks. To solve this they used the mod_proxy and mod_rewrite Apache modules to rewrite a whole lot of filenames from filename.asp to filename.php.
The other challenge was deciding on wether to re-write the applications in PHP or to use a tool such as asp2php to convert the applicaitons. With concerns that a straight conversion might cause unforseen problems the team opted to re-create the code using Smarty templates. “Using Smarty Templates we felt we had a very rapid application development anyway. Smarty Templates are templates within PHP which enables you to develop code very quickly,” says Boon.
What were the motives for Oxfam to switch to free software?
“Convergence,” says Boon. “We had an open source Internet platform and wanted to standardise on one platform. We did have some philosophical debates but in terms of which way to move we had to jump one way or another. There were fairly strong views but what won it over was that the content people wanted the open source platform. And we could show on
the backend that Apache was the market leader and had a better history of security.”
So, although the philosophy behind free software was a motivating factor it wasn’t the deciding factor.
Does Oxfam plan to expand its use of FLOSS?
“For web-based stuff we’re building on that platform. We’re moving to a document-content management system based on Zope-Plone and also having single sign-ons with the mod_pub cookie. So people could enter their sign-on once, and across all partner sites, could get personalised content and the benefits of security,” explains Boon.
