Web Services

Content Management

Successfully productive at the Max Planck Society since the end of 2002, Infopark CMS Fiona was deployed at the MPImF in July 2006. Fiona is a very powerful Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS), which allows the adminsitration of several complex websites by a multiplicity of editors.

It also allows the complete separation of content, layout and structure and therewith to collect and to maintain different kinds of content and to publish them on a large variety of different channels (i. e., Web, PDF and Mobile Devices).

With its fine-granuled rights- and access management, every network user can maintain his own area without bothering the areas of the others; the Workflow Management ensures a constantly high data quality. There is no need of special knowledge to use Fiona, and it can be used with a modern Web Browser on every operating system. With the seamless, user-specific integration of external applications (such as BBEdit, Macromedia Dreamweaver), every user can continue to work with his familiar tools.

www.mpimf-heidelberg.mpg.de

Besides of the Institute's Website itself, the public Web Presence actually consists of 24 single sites of the Departments, Research Groups and Facilities as well as of a pluarality of personal user websites and a total of more than 50.000 HTML documents and a constantly growing number of graphics, PDF-, Office-, Movie- and Soundfiles; at the moment, the total amount of data lies around 5 Gigybytes.

Besides the presentation of the Institute, the goal is mainly to be the first source of information (Where? Who? How?) for guests, external collaborators and visitors of the Institute.

Intranet

The Intranet represents the base for inhouse communication, information management and -retrieval; the source is a portal page from wich the most important topics

Internal data and information of the departments
Internal Areas of i. e. the Library
Internal Event announcements
Addresses and Phone Book
Circulars and further information of the Max Planck Society
Access to the CMS and to the single editorial boards

are directly reachable. Form within the Institute, access is granted without, from external with authentication. The transmission of those credentials is secured via SSL.

Wiki

A wiki is a type of website that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit and change some available content. The term wiki refers to "Wiki-wiki", what means "hurry quick" in Hawaiian. As usual in Hypertexts, the different pages and articles of a Wiki are connected to each other via links. The pages can be edited directly on-screen. Therefore, an edit function is implemented.

The current Wiki installations at the MPImF, serve, amongst others for:

common institute-wide information exchange
technical documentation
cross-site group collaboration

are PHP / MySQL based (MediaWiki) and accessible from everywhere within the IP address range of the Institute - even over external Dial-In via ISDN or VPN.

public_html: /~username

Every User with a network account has the possibility to create his own official website; the directory (public_html) is synchronized several times a day with both the Intranet and the WWW servers. The pages can be developed and maintained either locally on the own PC, within the home directory on one of the files servers or in CMS Fiona.