The Medical Research Council (MRC) has aligned with government`s open source strategy (OSS), following its implementation of Cape Town-based software development company Jam Warehouse`s new enterprise document management system, KnowledgeTree.
"The Medical Research Council is to be commended for their vision in supporting South African software and aligning itself with the government`s OSS," says Dr John Thorne, MD of Jam Warehouse.
"We started off with a rather basic solution and the MRC has funded its further development into an enterprise document management system, in order to manage its knowledge assets. As it is an open source system, further benefits will arise from future improvements introduced by other organisations."
He says KnowledgeTree is able to run on most server platforms and is accessible through a Web browser. The application provides knowledge management features, including version control, full text search, multiple search types and extensible metadata fields for documents.
Gillian Staniland, manager of the MRC`s Knowledge Management Division, says the organisation chose to go with open source for a number of reasons.
"We were aware that it is very necessary to build capacity and skills locally, and on top of that we needed a system that could be customised to our specific needs," says Staniland.
"Also, we were not hampered by the idea of costly licence fees that needed to be renewed on an annual basis. With this system, it doesn`t matter how many users we have, the cost of operation does not increase."
She says that as the MRC is connected to the government, it was felt that the correct choice would be to pursue a similar OSS, although when implementing future technologies, she maintains that the organisation will choose whatever platform best suits the environment, the users and their needs.
"The beauty of KnowledgeTree is that it can run on any platform, we can adjust the system as needed and can make changes to it ourselves, and we are not committed to any one supplier or vendor," she says.
"It is fast, efficient and really works for us. From a knowledge management perspective, it really is simply a best practice scenario."
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