Social and corporate network for the education system. History of creation and development

Introduction

Hello, habravchane and habravchanki!

This story does not claim to be extra originality, but it can be useful for those who want to create their own corporate network. I work in the education system and faced with the need to create an effective tool for distance learning and the exchange of experience between teachers and some parts of the narration will be devoted to the solution of precisely these problems, but general issues are also raised.

As you probably know, any government (and even more so educational) institution should have its own website that meets certain standards. At the beginning of last year, I, as a sysadmin of the entire district (and I serve 35 institutions) were given the task for each institution to create a website. And all would be nothing, but I also have to fill some of the sites with content due to the lack of computers, not to mention the Internet in more than half of them.
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Naturally, I wanted to automate this process. Immediately eliminating static options (I needed feedback, etc.), I opened my brain to a stream of consciousness from Google pages and came to the conclusion that I needed a social network.

For those who do not catch the logic will explain. Firstly, I needed a centralized system for receiving applications and counting requests, available within a radius of 100 km to any person. A multisite system was needed, in which there would be several types of user profiles (teacher, parent, student), depending on the type of profile, certain functions and different access to network communities are available to the user. And there were a lot of community types - school. class, methodical association, subject teachers, various circles and children's voluntary organizations. Each of the significant communities should have its own website, preferably with a distinction between the rights to publish and edit materials and link to the community group. The most difficult thing was to distinguish all this tautology and at the first stage at least define the concepts.

Why not create a social network

I, as usual, went a long way. Partly due to the fact that he did not find ready-made tools that actually existed at that time, they simply were not a generally accepted standard. If you, like me once, decide that you need such a network - first read the resources that already provide this service. In particular, the diary has already been approved by the Ministry and is quite suitable for educational purposes, there are other equally interesting ones. Just do not get carried away, there is no worse when you use a social service like mail for work. I know from personal experience.

If you like to produce entities, or you have new and fresh ideas that you want to implement, or you do not have a relationship to education - go ahead.

How can you make a social network

You need to decide on the target audience, pick up a CMS, purchase hosting - in general, I will not repeat banal things, they are already overwhelmed by the Internet. Read my story further.

So, I firmly decided to create an educational network, and I realized that in general I don’t know anything about it. No, of course, I used social services, but problems arose in creating a highly specialized resource. An acceptable variant was obtained only from the second attempt, after three months of testing the first version.

Want to know what was my mistake? And I will tell in any case, at the same time I will try to explain how they could have been avoided.

My mistakes:

First, and most importantly, I began to “globalize.” That is, to look for a solution that will allow in the foreseeable future to connect to the network an unlimited number of users, of course with the support of multilingual and even letters from right to left. This is very good on the scale of the former USSR, but as practice has shown at the level of a small area it is absolutely not necessary - the redundancy of functions creates only additional problems that will overlap each other like a snowball.

From the first error the second flowed smoothly - the wrong selection of CMS. After listening to the advice of the wise "gurus" of the Internet, I first rejected the obvious decision and spent a lot of time with engines such as Joomla, Drupal, LiveStreet, Pligg, ELGG, Dolphin, and even the Social Engine. But any of them had to be carefully finished, ready-made solutions demanded money and their number was strictly limited (that is, they were absent altogether), as well as the time for development. I will not say that in the end it was chosen in order not to accidentally mislead anyone, but a month after the launch of the project, the network began to take too much time. There were problems with system updates, the introduction of new functions, the training of end users and the provision of the necessary freedom of action.

In the end, was selected ... Wordpress. Making difficult maneuvers in an attempt to avoid tomatoes and eggs flying at me from all sides, I will explain my choice. Yes, it is heavy, yes, not flexible enough, but it is very well implemented multisite and, you will agree, one of the most friendly and simple administration interfaces. On explaining to a person with a shudder perceiving the concepts of “internet” and “e-mail” how to publish their materials correctly takes a little over an hour, in a group a little longer, but then you can train several people at once. In this case, all the initially requested functions are present in the “clean” installation, without a single additional plug-in.
Then for the subsites, a design theme was left, with which users customized the look and feel of their sites as closely as possible to their current preferences. Even without knowledge of html, not to mention php. On the main site, BuddyPress is spinning in which all necessary functions are gradually implemented, from the exchange of personal messages to project management systems. It only remains for me to administer the network, choosing which plug-ins to activate for all forcibly, and which users will enable themselves if necessary to use the functionality implemented by them (for example, bbpress included only 3 of 35 sites, the rest is enough for social projects).

As time has shown, the use of the simplest solution has justified itself. Anticipating questions about the load on the server - just enough. Of the registered 20,000 users, almost one third of them are actively involved; simultaneous online at “rush hour” does not exceed 500 people, mediocre hosting copes with this quite well. Virtually no optimization, eAcselerator and all.

Corporate network

The social network dealt with the interaction of teachers, students and parents, but there were still moments that caused a state close to hysterics — all business correspondence was sent through the mail service, and his agent was used for “quick” communication. I think you understand how inconvenient this is.

It was necessary to find a solution for a single address space without any extra functions and, of course, a replacement for the agent.

Of course, it was possible to reconfigure the server, install Jabber on it, mail server, configure certificates, etc., but why? I remind you - there is no funds for infrastructure development and in the whole organization there is not even one permanent IP address.

On the other hand, we had a whole domain with which you can do whatever you want. Helped the "big brother".
Google has long been providing a huge amount of freebies educational and state. institutions and I, as a person with an indestructible Russian mentality, could not get past this freebie.
Having smoked a bit of GoogleApps advertising pages, I realized that this would be an ideal solution, both in terms of financial investments and taking into account subsequent labor costs. Within half an hour, operations confirmed the rights and registration of the working environment. After completing all the checks I had, in addition to the mail, there was practically everything that modern business needs for work. I risk to slip up to advertising, but here it is simply not required. The agent replaced the Talk, with a shared address book, a small MSOffice extension automatically places the documentation in personal vaults, which users can set up access to within the organization themselves.
Of course, placing the workspace in the cloud entails certain risks. An order of increasing privacy concerns. But, on the other hand, when working through the Internet, I think you can rely on a corporation, the whole range of services of which lies in this area.

The result and a few words in the end

Social and corporate network, through the domain, were in a single address space. On the one hand, this is a plus, but on the other hand, we have to be more attentive to sites. The functions of the automatic mailing began to play into the hands of some Chinese brethren, who were literally falling asleep with spamming yet “fragile” website, even had to switch to the system of invites and manually moderating registrations for a while.
In the higher instances, they are still interested in the resource, since they already have experience of implementation in other regions. Now I puzzle how to combine them, while only the words “cluster”, “distributed computing system”, “cloud” come to mind, but everything depends on funding, therefore, it will surely stall.

Thanks to everyone who fell asleep for your attention!