AIAA datakiosk

[Laurel Stell]

OK, I went to datakiosk.aiaa.org. It's slower than Christmas -- or whatever
your holiday of preference is. Then the icon of the Evil Empire popped up.
Does anybody else want to use this site?

Laurel

[Rick (RocketScience) Kwan]

I just tried the site; the speed seemed decent. (Perhaps someone
rebooted the machine?) I'm using this from an Unbuntu Linux machine
at home. This is faster than what I've experienced on the AIAA
Computer Systems TC private site, which is also powered by SharePoint
(but not run by AIAA HQ).

On the datakiosk.aiaa.org site, there is not much to see aside from a
skeletal structure for how organization would be organized. I cannot
see how to add documents, update lists, or whatever. These operations
would need a user account. You would want to see how easy it is to
add information. Does the information show up where you want it to
show up? Can the user easily navigate to find it? I can't make this
evaluation based on what we can do now.

My wild guess is that this would be the replacement for how sections
and technical committees now post information. The current system is
based on Cold Fusion; this presumably would replace that with
SharePoint. As I recall from the CSTC, SharePoint allows you to
upload documents such as Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, etc. I
believe it is intended to seamlessly work with Microsoft Windows
systems, probably in the form of making files appear as part of your
desktop, and editing without saving to your local machine.

This is intended to make workgroups more productive. Unfortunately,
these formats are also sources of viruses which the poster can
unwittingly spread. I believe this is why the Wikipedia software does
not allow someone doing update to upload such documents; in their
case, the consequences to their user population could be catastrophic.

When I was looking at the site with Ehab, there seemed to be choices
for selecting a web authoring system, e.g., DreamWeaver, PHP/MySQL,
etc. I don't see those anymore. It would have been interesting to
see where those choices lead.

It seems that every couple of years, I get into this re-evaluation
whether we want to migrate to the AIAA HQ server and have our events
and calendar and other info displayed through their system. I've
actually done some experimentation with this; I didn't see an easy way
for section members to discover our info. We do a much better job by
a combination of our site and the e-mail updates.

But I'm still unsure what the purpose of this site is? Is it for
sharing info among section council members, or to expose info the
those outside the council, including non-members? If it is the
latter, I am dead set against this. We should not be sharing
documents that (1) have a heavy start-up cost, and (2) can readily
carry viruses when posted by a non-expert user. But really, I don't
know what the goal is.

--Rick

[Corwin H. Lakin]

I tried subject site too from home using IE and Vista (it did not work from
my lap-top using CruzNet at NASA bldg 19). I like the idea and tried
unsuccessfully to sign-in while on the San Francisco Section page. In my
opinion, National should implement it for Section Council members and we
should keep our own site for the world.
--Corky