The 15th of June end of the day

Today was great! We succeeded in doing so much and completing things we did not think possible. We looked at the project plan this morning and we concluded that we need to research the mobile interface really well. We actually did not have a clue of what to do and how to complete or even begin the project.

Yesterday at lunch if someone told me we will be as far as we got today, I will really have thought that they are mad.

We sat down and started discussing possible problems which we thought would be relevant to the integration of the internet site of CSIR and the intranet. The problems there included who the clientele was. The clientele we assigned as the target market and got that established. It was hard to get around the fact that the intranet is private to the CSIR and the internet is public. We had to use both sources to construct the mobile site. Questions that came to mind was the fact that must we now implement a database and create a log in profile for all the employees? This was just ridiculous and and almost impossible not even mentioning really unnecessary. We concluded that we will only add information that is relevant and not private, which can not be used to harm the company.Other problems was to figure out why we need to use the intranet because the internet has sufficient information.

Then we looked at the way we could create the mobile site. Problems posed as what domain are we going to use for the .mobi site and whether we have a budget to use to buy a domain. It turns out that we do not have a budget(go figure) and we had to look for free domains.

A problem we have with the future of this project, maintaining it, is updating the site and the usability there of. It turns out the Zinadoo website is not too bad and we will leave it in the hands of the project leaders.

Another alternative we had was to create a full scale website in DreamWeaver and then mobilize the website like we did with the blogs.

I used the CSIR's logo on my blog and was kindly asked to remove it, I do not understand why because it is good marketing for the company, but I know thy have their rules and regulations and I will respect it. This posed another question, will we be allowed to use the CSIR's logo for the .mobi site? (Well we did anyway)

The last problem which I was working on while Kriya was creating the .mobi site and Frank was busy typing and formulating the report, was to investigate and research to mobilize the “CSIR Research Space” and add it to the mobile site we are creating for the CSIRIS. The problem was that we could not find a way to mobilize the library. We discovered a website http://www.boopsie.com/ which states that they can mobilize any information, we sent them a few emails and did not get any reply from them. Our project leader Siphethile Muswelanto, put us in contact with Bram Luyten who was in Belgium when we communicated across a social networking technology, “Skype”. Bram Luyten works for a company called “@mire” in Belgium; they develop add-ons for DSpace and Fedora softwares. DSpace is the software that the library is written in and uses.

What we found and gathered from the advice we got from Bram Luyten, is that DSpace out of the box, doesn't support mobile devices. One alternative would be to tie your application with the DSpace services framework (http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/DSPACE/DSpace+Services+Framework) which is based on Java SPRING( http://www.springsource.org/ ). If you know how to deal with a SPRING framework, you'll have no trouble using the DSpace services framework, and we are not programming students and this posses a problem.

A more lightweight approach to mobile integration would be to use the DSpace RSS feeds into a mobile interface but the possible functionality is much more limited.

We decided to look into the RSS feeds because the CSIR DSpace is updated often and employees are subscribed to various collections and will get a message if it is updated.

It was so cool to speak to a person in real time from a different country.

Then we emailed the report to Siphithile and asked very nicely if we may have off because of the soccer that starts at 16h00. We went and chilled on the couch and watched the last minutes of New Zealand against Slovakia which ended 1-1 with New Zealand scoring their goal in aftertime...very lucky!!

Anyway I'm off.

Over and out..