g-Serve

g-Serve content management framework has been developed in the UK by System Associates and has been implemented for a number of high profile clients including HM Treasury, the Greater London Authority, the National College for School Leadership and the British Library.

Supporting large sites and Government standards

g-Serve has been specifically designed to fulfil the needs of large organisations with complex business processes and large, dynamic websites and complies with various UK Government directives such as eGIF, eGMS, WAI and W3C. Importantly this means g-Serve supports eGovernment compliance for public sector organisations and also provides some of the highest technical and accessibility standards for the private sector.

Ease of use, impressive functionality

We have designed g-Serve to provide a simple, easy-to-use content management solution with a wide range of features. It is our aim to provide users with just the right level of functionality to suit them and their organisation. To support this aim, we keep interfaces simple and straightforward, whilst providing the capacity to deliver much more through a powerful library of features accessible via the application programming interface (API).

Core components

The following core system components are provided as the basis of the g-Serve content management system.

• Creation and editing of content - One interface can manage the content of multiple sites, in multiple languages for multiple delivery channels.
• Workflow - This component manages the lifecycle of a piece of content right through from creation to archiving. The system includes workflow administration and supports multiple workflows.
• Security - You can control access to all sections of the system as well as managing users for the workflow roles. Authoring rights can be simply applied at a site, section and page level.
• Publishing - This component publishes and un-publishes content to the front end website. You can publish content in ColdFusion, JSP, ASP and HTML as required.
• Versioning - You can use the version control system for versioning all internally created and externally imported content and media store items and to build up an archive of versioned items.
• Media Store - This feature manages the upload, storage, search and retrieval of all third party media components such as images, videos, MS Office documents, PDFs, Flash movies and so on.
• Metadata - A fully extensible metadata store compliant with e-GMS and Dublin Core metadata specifications, including automatic importing and updating of taxonomies. User defined schemas are also supported.
• Extensions - Application extensions (encapsulated applications that can be written to handle any function specified by the site manager) provide dynamic, inline web applications. We supply g-Serve with a number of pre-built extensions including News, What's new, a forms engine, FAQ engine, forums, polling and web logs, A-Z index, syndication components, site map, dynamic menus, interfaces to forums and chat, personalisation components and metadata driven components.
• Optional modules - Optionally g-Serve customers can also integrate with some of our larger modules to provide document management, search, digital media libraries, single sign-on and a user registration system.

Technical overview

The concept of our g-Serve content management framework is to provide a flexible, extensible system through which we can provide and implement a solution that meets the exact needs of your organisation.

The key to g-Serve's functionality is the clear separation of the user interface, the database interface and the system functions. This provides support for multiple database versions and for hosting several admin user interfaces within a single system. The standards for interfaces to each function are maintained as an API. To ensure backward compatibility, we are committed to maintaining consistency throughout future releases of the framework.

Connectivity to other systems is provided through a wide range of services including:

• .NET web services
• Software objects
• EJB
• Java Class
• COM/DCOM
• Corba
• ODBC/JDBC
• OLEDB
• XML files

System requirements

The minimum system requirement for g-Serve is a single Windows or Unix based server with a database either installed on it or accessible over a network. This configuration will provide a full service and can host the entire content management system (CMS) and the published website if required.

We will recommend a configuration to suit the specific requirements of your organisation. However a typical installation will include a staging server for hosting the CMS and (optionally) the database. This server will then publish to multiple local and remote web servers using the publishing method you choose.

System Associates recommend Oracle or SQL Server databases (or alternative enterprise standard databases) for content storage, IIS or Apache web servers and a Java Run Time Environment or J2EE server (or a combination of both).

Available licences

We offer two versions of the g-Serve licence, the Standard and the Special Government.

Standard licence

Our standard licence covers the following:

• g-Serve CMS, with a full suite of application extensions
• Installation
• Technical and user training
• A full suite of technical and user documentation
• 90 days warranty from final delivery

Special Government licence

In addition to all of the standard licence features, this special licence also provides:

• A site wide source licence, covering unlimited sites, users and servers
• Full, unencrypted source code

Please contact us for more information on how g-Serve could help your organisation.