Sun Microsystems SA and its partner AL Indigo - the new, black-owned enterprise solutions company - have provided technology to create a groundbreaking HIV/AIDS portal for SA's Medical Research Council (MRC).
Gillian Staniland, Knowledge Management Divisional Manager at the MRC, says the HIV/AIDS portal, which can be visited at www.afroaidsinfo.org, was conceived and designed to be a comprehensive resource for information and research for researchers, health professionals, policy-makers, educators and the public.
"According to UNAIDS, HIV/AIDS is now the number one cause of death in Africa, and has moved to fourth place among all causes of death worldwide," says Staniland. "We believe that improved information and knowledge management is an essential enabling element in the fight against this pandemic."
The MRC felt an intelligent information portal linked to a comprehensive underlying information infrastructure would be an appropriate tool to structure a wide variety of data, so that portal users could find reliable and relevant information quickly.
The purpose of the information portal is primarily to deliver comprehensive and unified access to a heterogeneous collection of information sources through a secure access layer. "It also caters for services such as discussion groups, generating newsletters on new information added on certain categories of information, e-transactions if required, and bibliographic services," explains Staniland.
The MRC approached AL Indigo with a specification for a technology platform to deliver HIV/AIDS information aggregated from multiple sources to various sub-communities of interest within the HIV/AIDS context. Apart from personalisation, specific functionality required from the solution included notification with strict security models. For this reason, Staniland says their preference was to apply a Unix-based solution.
"Because of the volume of information available on the portal, extensive intelligent searching of data in multiple formats and sources - including relational databases - was a prerequisite, with strong document management capabilities and the integration of e-mail," says Chris Mulder, solution architect at AL Indigo.
He explains that the delivery platform had to be able to allow users to customise the content delivered to them, within their field of interest or expertise.
"The MRC is already the custodian of thousands of research articles and documents, and required the delivery platform to provide maximum re-use of these resources, without having to administer a brand new repository of information," he says.
Another requirement was that the chosen technology should be able to integrate with existing and future applications.
"Because of the diversity of the audience needs and the volume and dynamic nature of the information, it was decided that Sun portal technology with its openness would best suit this site. In fact, the technology offered by the Sun ONE portal met many of our feature requirements," says Staniland.
"Another factor in opting for Sun technology is that Sun Microsystems SA was willing to provide the initial licenses at a much reduced rate, impressing us with its commitment to assisting in shouldering southern Africa's health burden. This allowed us to use the savings on customisation costs and content development," adds Staniland.
Sun Microsystems' regional manager for the coast Andre Muzerie believes that Sun can provide the right technology and infrastructure to create a workable solution to help Southern Africa's efforts against AIDS. "It's critical for the country to know and understand what is happening with the AIDS pandemic. Technology has to be leveraged to help move the fight against the disease for all southern Africans," he says.
The entire portal is built on Sun Fire F280V servers and the Sun ONE (Open Network Environment) software stack. This includes Sun ONE Portal Server, Secure Remote Access Pack, Personalised Knowledge Services, Directory and Web Server, Jive Software and the MySQL Open Source SQL database. Mulder says another reason AL Indigo proposed the Sun solution was because of its inherent ability to provide role-based access control and various forms of content syndication and aggregation.
"Built on the Sun ONE Web Server with Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Technologies such as Java Servlets and Java Server Pages, the Sun ONE Portal Server was able to provide most of the functionality required with little customisation, while still maintaining a high level of scalability."
Mulder adds that the Java platform is ideal for integrating third-party applications such as discussion forums. "Jive Software Forums was chosen to host various discussion forums surrounding the project. Because Jive Software Forum products are also J2EE-based, single sign-on between the portal and Jive Software Forums was effortlessly obtained," he says.
The J2EE-standards base also future-proofs the portal, as new applications can be developed while using the extensive application programming interfaces provided by the technology. J2EE also provides support for next-generation devices such as browser-enabled mobile phones and other handheld devices.
At the time of the planning and deployment for the first phase of this project, few or no best practices and deployment methodologies were available within the portal services context, says Mulder. "This was particularly true for public-facing portals, as most of the deployments happening worldwide are of an intranet and enterprise services nature.
"Thus, one of the biggest challenges faced was educating MRC project participants, and other contractors for page and content design, on the concepts and methodologies used within this emerging technology. However, this was overcome through the ability to rapidly deploy the Sun ONE Portal Server out-of-the-box into a working prototype, allowing MRC staff to familiarise themselves with the product, during and in-between project planning sessions," he says.
Staniland adds that the provision of good content, quality assurance, content classification and interface design debates, proved difficult to manage.
"We have since solved most of these issues, but have learned that a portal project is very complex, and involves a multitude of differently skilled role-players, complex technology, information specialists and even ethical and copyright issues, especially in the area of HIV/AIDS," she says.
The portal has succeeded in that it has enabled users to easily navigate through a vast array of information in a logical fashion. "We receive daily news feeds from an African news agency, while the portal also contains flash movies intended for young children. We are committed to ensure that all information published on the portal is from a credible source, and it is vetted by our editorial panel ensuring that the users of this resource receive accurate and reliable information," says Staniland.
"Sun believes in taking a partnership approach with organisations like the MRC to develop innovative solutions that deliver real world value. This model leverages the contributions of the customer, our partners like AL Indigo, and ourselves as the vendor, to deliver a secure, reliable, scalable and affordable solution that we believe can work to improve SA, while providing a model for future projects of this nature," Muzerie concludes.
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Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision - "The Network Is The Computer" - has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com
AL Indigo
African Legend Indigo (AL Indigo) is one of only a handful of black-owned IT companies to focus exclusively on enterprise systems solutions.
The new company, which provides end-to-end solutions based primarily around Sun Microsystems ' offerings, BMC Software's world class enterprise systems management offerings, Peregrine Systems and the Veritas Software suite, has already secured contracts valued at almost R50 million. The annual turnover for the company's first financial year is projected to be more than R250 million.
AL Indigo has 103 staff members at its Sandton head office, and 13 in Cape Town. It has already defined its employment equity plan for the next three years, and has identified skills transfer as a high priority on its agenda.
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