Development of Knowledge Portal using Open Source Tools: A Case Study of FIIT, UNISEL

Abstract — Knowledge sharing culture contributes to a positive working environment. Currently, there is no platform for the Faculty of Industrial Information Technology (FIIT), Unisel academic staff to share knowledge among them. As it is done manually, the sharing process is through common meeting or by any offline discussions. There is no repository for future retrieval. However, with open source solution the development of knowledge based application may reduce the cost tremendously. In this paper we discuss about the domain on which this knowledge portal is being developed and also the deployment of open source tools such as JOOMLA, PHP programming language and MySQL. This knowledge portal is evidence that open source tools also reliable in developing knowledge based portal. These recommendations will be useful to the open source community to produce more open source products in future. Keywords — Knowledge management, Portal, Content Management, JOOMLA . I. I NTRODUCTION O develop a portal, we need reliable software, knowledge and technical skill. Purchase suitable software that suits our needs will require money and time consuming. But not many organization has sufficient budget for it. Therefore, Faculty of Industrial Information Technology (FIIT), University Industry Selangor have decided to develop knowledge portal using open source tools. Open source software can be defined as “software that is made available freely to all and many of them voluntarily contributes developing software for the organization” [1]. This portal can be accessed from any computer clients connected to the internet. The purpose of this knowledge portal is to be a catalyst center of knowledge information within the FIIT, UNISEL. It is hope that the portal will increase the efficiency and productivity of the faculty by eliminating manual and offline knowledge sharing. In this article we present the domain analysis on which this portal going to be implemented, methodology practiced during the development of the portal. Then, we explain open source tools deployment and also how is the architecture of knowledge portal. At the end of this article, there is a few screen shoot of knowledge portal also showed as a result of the open source tools reliability. II. D