Loading...
 
Features / Usability

Features / Usability


customer area - possible or not?

posts: 1

Hi!

We need a customer area for our business and I'm currently evaluating TikiWiki, as it seams to have those features we need. But before I try to do things that aren't possible with TikiWiki, I would like to ask you some things.

We have about 10 customers whom we need to provide some feedback about tasks we have done for them, some general informations and provide files for download. A integration of an online calendar service though CalDAV would be nice too. Also, we want to have an own area to store own (internal) informations there. We also need something for ourselves to track the time spent on each task and customer - just tracking (writing down e.g. "3 hours"), we will later import this data into Filemaker for evaluation. Important: We want an all-in-one solution, not 10 different tools (as currently...).

Ok, for most cases a Wiki would be fine. We currently are storing our information on a MediaWiki - but any kind of wiki will do the job fine as long as it has some kind of ACLs. MediaWiki hasn't.

TikiWiki has ACLs, so each enterprise will have it's own group, all employee with whom we are in contact will have their own user account. One user must only be able to see pages (or in general: any kind of information) he has the rights for, but must not be able to see anything that is assigned for another group - even it's existence. So customer A should not even be able to find out B is also one of our customers (yeah... that's business!). Will that be possible? The alternative would be to have one installation per customer - not that nice.

Till some months ago, we have told our customers what we have done through Wordpress - each customer one Blog installation, each task one entry. The entries were tagged, so it was possible to see what has been done for each project. Because we track quite similar information internally (general information + internal comments, time spent on task, etc), it would be nice to handle this on one single system. We want to have just one form where we enter the description visible for the customer and out internal information. The customer will later only see the data he is allowed to see (topic, tags, summary of what has been done), we will extract a CSV file (or even better an XML file) from what has been tracked. So... will that be possible? Any ideas, how to start? How much hacking will that need?


About myself: I know PHP since early 4.0 ages and have hacked some other CMS lately, so I'm not afraid of adding some features by myself. But of course, I don't have to much time to spend... customers are waiting for their new customer area :-)

So it would be nice to get some feedback as soon as possible... I really need to know if this project will be possible with TikiWiki a minimum of effort.

Thanks!
craesh

posts: 400

Hi,

This should be quite doable. Tiki has a finely grained permissioning system and the Trackers feature could be used to do the tracking you need - the feature essentially lets you create a database, create custom forms for entering data, create filtered queries, etc.

If you want more specifics, you might try the developer mailing list if you haven't already. You can sign up for it at http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Dev+Mailing+List and it has power users following it.

Hope that helps!