Communication

I have been exploring a number of programs/systems in the area of communication during the past few years. I am always eager to learn effective means of communication. I am ever curious as how to find the proper method to keep in touch and work collaboratively, as cheap and as easy as possible. With the explosive growth of the OpenSource movement, some very powerful projects came forward to challenge more expensive proprietary ones. Here, I would like to name some of those projects and you can explore more yourself:

DimDim:
Alfresco
Zimbra
Moodle

I hope that my school in Chicago, Catholic Theological Union, a graduate school of Theology, will adopt some of these powerful opensource tools. I am more interested in the integration of these projects together, like using DimDim for classmates and professors to meet virtually. Others have used Alfresco to manage their contents and use it along with Moodle, or allow users to update document changes straight to the server within MS Office (see example below).



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On a side note, I am trying to learn more about Asterisk and other software/hardware combination that will allow the members in my community to connect with other sites for free or cheaply. I am interested in Unified Communication systems. An interesting project named SARK integrates an SMB/SME (Small to Medium Size Business/Enterprise) Server and a PBX. Other open source systems include DRUID and Elastix. Check it out yourself. If you know or use other projects, please let me know and I would be happy to share it with others here.
Stay tune…