Websites designed with users in mind

Case study: ITC consultancy services for Sociality

Since March 2003, Surfability has worked on many major projects with Sociality Ltd, providing specialist technical support and ITC consultancy.

Website management tools

Sociality has used its Guildhall infrastructure to provide web portal services for a number of prestigious membership organisations in the UK, and Surfability has supported these projects by:

• Mapping out an initial semantic sitemap for a large professional association (trade union) using our WebLayout tool.
• Setting up a Linux server for Guildhall product development - with documented installations of the Zope open source content management system and CVS.
• Configuring the Apache web server to use virtual hosts with Zope; and documenting the process.

Streaming media

To support a live Sociality webcast for an international charitable organisation in November 2003, we performed the following tasks:

• Investigated Darwin streaming server technology and installed it on two Linux servers with firewalls, documentation and initialisation scripts.
• Implemented live audio/video streaming via DSS and QuickTime broadcaster from Mac OS X.
• Configured numerous virtual host configurations for Apache.
• Used the Surfability servers to host live webcasts via a wireless (WiFi) connection from the Sociality office.

Multiple operating systems

We have supported Sociality's use of various operating systems by providing:

• NFS configuration for networking Solaris and Mac OS X systems
• Support and documentation for Solaris systems - including: System diagnostics, installation of Open Source Software (OSS) and general System Administration.
• Installation of Microsoft Windows 2000 plus updates, drivers and the Apache 2 web server with SSL.
• An e-mail server configured to act as a bulletin board - using sendmail and bespoke Perl software.