We are busy building "an electronic library" at work. However this is such a boring idea (3rd one I've done in the last two years), that we decided to stretch the idea a bit further.
With the excellent IT support I was provided with, we set to, providing a work blog for news and some collaborative working tools for the group we are providing the library for. Who knows whether the young people in the Ministry are brave enough to try anything. They have new computers but don't really know what they should be doing. Not sure electronic collaborative working helps this situation.
We decided to put it on the government server itself, as the ministry internet connection to the server is by satellite and very slow. This only solves a third of the problem, because at the moment we still have to load files onto the server from the ministry which is fine after everyone has gone home but horrendously slow and crash prone during the day. We found that both of us uploading even small files brought the network practically to a halt. And then there was the power cut, but at least the generator kicked in and we could work. The biggest problem is that government people are not so well paid so the people who are recruited are not so well trained or dynamic enough as those who work in the private sector like the guy who is helping me.
But my real panic was that I hadn't realised the site was already live (luckily Google hasn't crawled it yet) and there was I putting pseudo (and some not so pseudo) news items on the home page! Still we cleaned it up quick and now we can track if anyone reaches it, and cares enough to send an email.
Only one week to get something to present to the group, but we are both now having fun getting it working instead of arguing about the best way to do the user interface and the files will eventually get loaded.
Not a bad week for small achievements.
