Customers

Rice University: Connexions

Connexions is a web portal platform developed by Rice University for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Powering the Connexions website is Rhaptos, the open source software to enable authors, instructors and students to create, select, and assemble modular educational content into collections customized to meet their teaching and learning needs.

Jazkarta was hired to assist Rice University in building a platform to quickly deploy Rhaptos to other universities wishing to use the software. Jazkarta is developing software to automate the deployment to Amazon EC2.

• www.cnx.org
• www.rhaptos.org
  
  

Global Health Delivery Online

The Global Health Delivery Project aims to improve health among disadvantaged populations worldwide by systematizing the study of global health delivery and rapidly disseminating knowledge to practitioners through a range of coordinated initiatives.

Jazkarta was hired to assist Brigham and Women's Hospital with the ongoing maintenance and development of this Django-based site.

• ghdonline.org

New England Wild Flower Society

The New England Wild Flower Society has been awarded an NSF grant to develop an online flora of New England - the first comprehensive update of our knowledge of the region’s plants in 25 years. The project is intended to pique curiosity and spur learning about plants among a whole new generation of users. It will engage them, through their fascination with technology, to go outside and grow their fascination with the natural world. Because of our unique knowledge of both technology and botany, Jazkarta has been engaged to lead the development effort. The multi-faceted project will offer several plant identification keys, extensive photographs and information about all the region's plants, learning aids for students and teachers, and a social feature called MyPlants that will stimulate learning and discussion.

The technology components include Django, Python, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, and Solr.

• newfs.org

Oxfam America

Oxfam America is committed to creating lasting solutions to global poverty, hunger, and social injustice. Jazkarta is helping build the next generation Oxfam America website, which continues the organization's history of using Plone for its web presence.

Along with a complete redesign, the website will be migrated from Plone 2.5 to Plone 3. We are incorporating Google Maps using the Maps add-on to create content that places Oxfam's issues in a global context. The ImageEditor add-on allows staff to easily edit images right in Plone. In the spirit of giving back to the community, this project has produced improvements to both the collective.flowplayer and collective.formcriteria tools.

• www.oxfamamerica.org

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) recently became an accredited school and wanted to have a more dynamic website to attract new students and promote their academic activities. They engaged Jazkarta to build not only their public-facing website in Plone, but also a separate intranet site to provide up-to-date information to staff, students and faculty.

Both sites utilize PlonePAS (Pluggable Authentication Service) to allow users to login with their Active Directory credentials. We've also employed the excellent FacultyStaffDirectory (FSD) product to provide a searchable/browseable directory of all the faculty, staff and students.

• www.seas.harvard.edu
• intranet.seas.harvard.edu

HaiVision Inc

HaiVision Network Video is a world leader in delivering the most advanced video networking technology and IP video distribution solutions. HaiVision engaged Jazkarta to move their existing website onto the Plone platform.

Jazkarta used Deliverance to theme the Plone site using the client's existing HTML templates, allowing for fast development and quick relaunch. Jazkarta also worked to integrate their Plone site with Salesforce. This allows customer data to flow seamlessly between the two systems to supply advanced registration, authentication and site visitor and download tracking functionality.

• www.haivision.com

City of Albuquerque

With over 50 content contributors of varying skills scattered across many departments, the City of Albuquerque needed a content management system that offered both ease of use and flexibility. Like many other cities, they chose Plone. And when they needed a technology partner to help them upgrade their mature website - 15,000 pages and 1.5 million views per month - they turned to Jazkarta.

Jazkarta is helping the City upgrade the site to the latest version of all software, update the design and navigation, and adopt the latest development and deployment best practices. Deliverance will be used to theme the Plone site and several legacy sites from the same HTML template, saving the City time and money.

• Under development

Bioneers

Bioneers' mission is to "Grow social capital by catalyzing, connecting and strengthening strategic networks, including bioregional and community-based alliances". Bioneers currently uses Plone to manage their public website and given their positive experience with the platform they enlisted Jazkarta to build a Plone-based file-asset server.

This project will assist Bioneers in organizing, capturing, and storing Bioneers content (including text, photographs, audio, and video), and institutional knowledge (metadata) about that content so Bioneers staff and partners can easily access it. As part of this project, open source code is being developed to enhance Plone's management of large files via the web.

• Under development

Rocky View Schools

Serving residents to the west of Calgary, Rocky View Schools has over 16,000 students in grades K-12. It is the sixth largest school district in Alberta, with more than 1000 teaching and 700 support staff. On the first day of school, when all those teachers log in and start editing, their web content management system takes quite a beating.

Rocky View Schools chose the open source Plone CMS because it offered them the enterprise-level security and user management features they needed, with no licensing costs attached. When their deployment grew to over 50 sites and began to experience performance issues, they turned to Jazkarta, a Boston-based open source technology consultancy. Jazkarta performed a fixed price performance assessment and then implemented many of its recommendations. The result: a successful first day of school.

• www.rockyview.ab.ca

UNICEF: Our Stories

UNICEF is on the ground in over 150 countries and territories to help children survive and thrive, from early childhood through adolescence. The world’s largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. The Our Stories project helps people share the stories of their lives, no matter where they live or how their stories unfold.

Jazkarta was brought on board to assist with the technical implementation and development of the Our Stories site. The site features several ways for youth to tell their story: uploading a video, recording a video or audio using their computer's webcam, dialing a phone number and leaving a voicemail message or sending a text message. The stories are collected on the site, tagged with metadata and displayed on a Google Map. The technology used to build this site was Django and the Red 5 open source Flash media server that handles the video and audio streaming.

• www.ourstories.org

Advancing Green Chemistry

The mission of the non-profit organization Advancing Green Chemistry is to reduce or eliminate hazardous substances from the manufacture and use of chemical products. To that end, they are building connections between green chemists - who design the products - and environmental health scientists - who understand how the chemicals interact with biological systems. A major conference, information sharing, and policy development are all aided by a members-only collaborative website implemented using Plone. 

The site provides areas for members to post relevant papers, bibliographies, primers and analyses of important papers, and to collaboratively develop policy statements. 

• collab.advancinggreenchemistry.org (This site is password protected)

Oxfam Canada

Oxfam Canada is a non-profit international development organization that supports community programs in food security, health, nutrition and democratic development with an emphasis on working with women. Oxfam Canada hired Jazkarta to migrate their static HTML website to Plone. In addition to a site redesign and information architecture overhaul, over 800 pages were migrated.

Jazkarta used existing community-supported tools to minimize the amount of custom code needed to enhance Oxfam Canada's web presence.  The Pressroom product is used to create professional press releases.

• www.oxfam.ca

Food and Water Watch

Food and Water Watch is committed to creating an economically and environmentally viable future. Food and Water Watch is working with grassroots organizations and other allies around the world to challenge corporate control and protect the quality and safety of our food and water. 

Jazkarta built their website from scratch using Plone, implementing a visually appealing design and a dynamically driven website that any staff person can easily update. We incorporated best of breed add-on tools to provide additional functionality, such as blogs (Quills) and podcasts (Plone4Artists).

• www.foodandwaterwatch.org

Social Science Research Council

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is an independent, not-for-profit organization fostering social science research throughout the world, with an emphasis on developing innovative approaches to critical social issues. The Media Research Hub, part of the SSRC's Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere program, is a platform and toolkit linking researchers, advocates, and practitioners in the field.

At its heart is a Resource Database, a community populated and maintained system that permits easy searches for individuals, institutions, research materials, networks, and projects. It supports the composition of "profiles" tracing connections among resources, and the saving and sharing of exportable lists. Jazkarta has built the Media Research Hub as the first of a network of thematic SSRC Research Hubs, and the Katrina Research Hub and China Research Hub followed shortly after.

• Media Research Hub
• Katrina Research Hub
• China Research Hub

Central Massachusetts Regional Library System

CMRLS is a non-profit organization serving 244 libraries in 72 communities in central Massachusetts. Jazkarta was awarded a grant-funded project with CMRLS that enables small public libraries to offer user-friendly, attractive and easy to maintain websites through the use of our PondCMS product. PondCMS sites are hosted on Amazon EC2 to provide cost-effective scalability and reliability. Each participating library has its own Plone site where staff can create web pages and promote their online databases and programming. Fobes Memorial Library, pictured, is one example.

This project was funded through an LSTA grant called “Home on the Web”.

• fobeslibrary.org