The Domna Samiou Greek Folk Music Association is a non-profit organization founded in 1981 and its aim is the preservation and dissemination of Greek traditional music. The project’s aim was to design, develop and deliver a portal that would have the dual role of serving as a hub for knowledge regarding the biographic details of Domna Samiou, and a repository of information, resources and media regarding her personal work and related information.

The portal needed to balance aesthetically design with easy access and navigational tools to visitors. Equally the back office needed to be powerful and intuitive to use, in order to allow administrator users of different levels of responsibility to manage the information stored and provided on the portals front end.

The portal provides users with biographic details and profiles of not only Ms Samiou but also others who have worked with her or with her work; lists related media articles, concerts, albums and songs all interlinked together for easier navigation and usage. Searching, filtering and ordering of lists further enhance the experience.

In addition to the traditional functionality – the following extensions were included:

Back Office Administration (LMS): The TOOLIP CMS environment was extended with the addition of a back end office (closely integrated with the front end). Users are provided with functionality which facilitated improved administration of complex pages (e.g. homepage), taxonomy and metadata administration, multimedia library and management.

Musical Database administration: The LMS back office allows for full management of the database entities related with the songs, albums, concerts, partners, publications and media clippings and the relationships between them.

Advanced Text Searching (Apache Lucene): This powerful text search library of features is used to aid searching through the musical library for specific texts besides using the common searching interface (which utilises keywords)

Basic Social Bookmarking Toolbar: All pages of importance have been provided with a toolbar of useful icons that allow for printing, sending an email wit the page’s content but also to submit and promote the page in Twitter, Facebook and Google
 

 PROTAGON is one of the largest of news commentary portals in Greece with an average of more than 12,000 unique visitors per day. It hosts opinions and articles from popular Greek journalists and sponsors categories such as “Subjects”, “People”, “Dolce” and “Books”. It also hosts videos from the very popular Sunday night TV show “Protagonistes” which presents original stories of everyday heroes.  

• Gallery management for videos and photos
• Article management
• TV Shows management
• Tags, categories and user management
• Shouts management (a Twitter-like implementation that presents short texts in various parts of the website)
• User comments management
• Newsletter auto-generation and management
• Author's Blogs
• Box Management to enable the content management in various 'box container' pages

A Content Management System (CMS) is the term used to describe the software that allows the creation and management of the content of a website. A typical CMS facilitates the publication of all types content such as news, pages, images, videos, advertisements, menus, footers, tags, web forms etc, across all digital channels such as the Web, mobile and print. There are many CMSs on the market and vary greatly in terms of the features and also maturity, robustness and security levels they offer.

At EWORX we provide ICT consultancy and software development services, leveraging on the convergence of electronic media and answering to the need for innovative solutions to organisational and corporate challenges in the globalised economy.  Established in 2001 and headquartered in Athens, the company currently employs over 20 highly trained and skilled professionals who blend experience with multi-disciplinary expertise in Web 2.0 consulting and beyond, software development, project management, marketing,  branding, content and design. Since its establishment EWORX has steadily increased its yearly turnover and profits, building a customer base which spans across industries and several European countries.

The company offers consultancy services in the fields of Internet and Web technologies, information architecture, multimedia services, usability, accessibility, database applications including web integration to existing information systems.

Being a Design for All advocate, EWORX S.A. focuses on usability and accessibility, thereby ensuring that information is delivered in forms and media appropriate to all users, whatever their requirements.

Our main areas of focus are:

EWORX's customer base consists of public and private sector organisations, including the European Commission, European Institutions, Greek Ministries, Industry and NGOs. EWORX belongs to the European Network of Centres of Excellence in Design for all eAccessibility Network (www.edean.org) and is an iForce Partner of Sun Microsystems (recently acquired by Oracle).

EWORX is active in Greece, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Germany and Portugal.

Read more at our corporate website at www.eworx.gr

EWORX S.A. Greece: Headquarters: 66 Jean Moreas Str.
152 31 Halandri - Athens
Belgium: Perceval Centre, Tenbosch 9, B-1000 Brussels
Tel.  +30 210 6148380 Fax. +30 210 6729312
Email: info[at]eworx[dot]gr

 TOOLIP websites require a simple, managed hosting environment with a web server, a Java application server and a database management system. The vast majority of our clients assign the hosting of their TOOLIP websites to EWORX a lot of clients choose to host their websites at their premises with no impact on the performance.

 Not at all.

Each client has his own needs; TOOLIP is flexible enough to incorporate various features in various modules addressing customer-specific realities and requirements. Choose which of the features you would like in your website and ask for a quote now.

 Well that depends on the scope and the complexity of the business requirements. In essence it is straightforward to set up a TOOLIP site with the standard module functionality but the complexity of the required customisations will define the cost. 

No, TOOLIP is not open source. However, it utilizes several open source packages such as Apache Commons components, Hibernate, Freemarker      

 Yes TOOLIP can be easily integrated with external information publishing systems such as: 

• Multimedia provider handlers (youtube, google video, flickr, collegehumour, vimeo, brightcove)
• Weather forecasting systems
• Stocks data providers 
• RSS feeds from third party sites
• Enterprise document management systems

• Members registration
• Profile management
• Single sign-on
• Subscriptions and subscription management
• Bookmarks and bookmarks management
• Connections / Friends / Followers
• Activity streams
• Wall
• Networks / groups

• Product catalogue
• E-showroom with visually attractive presentation of products
• Shopping cart
• Ordering process
• Various online payment options
• Sales and Offers
• Related products
• Product bundles
• Powerful back-end management system
• Advanced reporting

• iPhone/iPad mobile applications development
• Google Android mobile applications development
• Mobile applications usability assessment

• Increasing your website's traffic by making sure your audience will find it easily
• Improving your website's visibility and popularity and improving your brand awareness
• Ensuring you website is highly ranked within search engines

• Logo design
• Newsletter templates, report templates and letterheads
• Animated and interactive online advertisement banners (using Adobe Flash or other platforms)
• Printed promotional material (e.g. leaflets, flyers, posters, bookmarks, business cards)

• Access to first and second-level support services managed through a single point of contact / escalation
• 24x7 real-time infrastructure and application monitoring and alerting
• Back-up and recovery management on system & application data
• Advanced information security management policies and virus protection management
• High-performance network capabilities

• Web Page rendering time < 500ms
• Monthly Guaranteed Uptime > 99,9%
• Round-trip delay within Europe ≤ 60 ms

EWORX took up the re-design and implementation of the new Hellenic American Union Portal. The two main goals of this project have been the definition of a subtle, yet strong online presence and visual identity for HAU and the absolute bilinguality (English and Greek) of the website.

The services and functionality EWORX implemented include the following:

• Bilingual Web Site Design and Development with 1-1 mapping of Greek and English pages;
• Different websites integrated in the same portal with different aesthetics, home pages, sidebars;
• Presentation of Books, Events, Courses, News, Biographies, Resources, Newsletters with specific page types for each of these content categories;
• E-commerce mechanism for online ordering of books/publications and booking of courses with appropriate payment module;
• Advanced search for Books, Events, Courses;
• Registration of members and members area;
• Registration to multiple Newsletters simultaneously;
• Associate content items with tags and user groups;
• Search by tag, user group, item type and website;
• Photo galleries, flash animations, Youtube embedded videos;

EWORX has continuously cared about the expansion of HAU Portal. The latest addition is the Bulgarian language, following the opening of new HAU offices in Sofia.

 

 

Moreover, EWORX has also taken up the design and implementation of  Hellenic American University Portal. We are really proud of the work done here, so go ahead, give it a click and check for yourself!

 

The overall aim of the project was to analyse, design and implement the new website of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), one of the key European Institutions which sits between the European Parliament, the Commission and the Social Partners. Part of the project was to migrate the vast content from the old website to the new one.

The Eworx team undertook:

• The adaptation of the Committee’s graphical charter to digital media (Website, Intranet and Member’s portal)
• The application of the adapted graphical charter for the EESC website
• The installation of the TOOLIP™ Web Content Management System for the EESC website
• The entire redesign and re-structuring of the EESC website
• The migration of the content from the old website to the new, involving heavy re-structuring, tagging and thematic classification
• The implementation of a global search tool that will allow visitors to search the entire content of the website in various ways and to retrieve relevant results
• Staff training and provision of documentation and supporting material associated with the administration and use of the TOOLIP CMS
• The annual maintenance of the TOOLIP installation of the EESC website and the updating and maintenance of any supporting material that have been developed.

During the website design process, several prototypes have been evaluated to assess both the proposed Information Architecture and the usability and navigability of the designs. Low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes, in addition to wireframes, have been produced and tested within closed user groups, using the appropriate tools.

A lot of attention was placed in content re-structuring. The proposed Information Architecture's primary aim was to effectively promote and render more accessible the vast quantity of content of the website. This was achieved by heavy inter-linking and tagging so that users can retrieve all types of content that share a common theme or attribute. Additionally, new navigation paths were analysed and determined until the new structure of the EESC website was finalized.

While building the website, the Eworx team deployed a number of Methodologies, including:

• Task Analysis
• Wireframes and Prototyping
• Testing / Validation of Wireframes / Prototypes with EESC Stakeholders
• Rapid Prototyping
• Agile Development

Eleftherotipia is one of the most popular newspapers in Greece. The purpose of this project was to develop and deliver an Online News Portal coupled with a back-end management system for the end-to-end lifecycle managment of news.

In order to address the challenges of a modern e-newspaper EWORX implemented and is continuously implementing a variety of cutting edge features.

Front End Features (News Portal)

• Fully customisable news boxes based on news and other information feeds
• Advanced search and archive search engines
• In addition to the online edition, a full view of the printed edition
• An RSS Feed engine, so users can always get up to date news of their interest
• Comments functionality
• Automatic weather forecasting

Back End Features (News Management System)

• article management system (incl. prioritisation, grouping and filtering)
• customised views for printed and online editions
• embedded article approval workflows
• multimedia management (with stand alone resource management functionality)
• user and editor management

• Web and Software Usability
• Web Accessibility
• Web Analytics
• Web Design (wireframes and prototyping)

What is TOOLIP™

TOOLIP™  (Tool for Internet Publishing) is a flexible and scalable Enterprise Content Management System (CMS). It helps build interactive websites that suit the needs of small and medium sized enterprises and yet it can scale easily to manage complex multimedia-rich, dynamic sites with thousands of multilingual pages supporting content distribution across multiple delivery channels.

Technical Details

Security

We take security very seriously so naturally TOOLIP is very secure. It implements all Top 10 web application security recommendations from OWASP so it protects your website and data from malicious acts and attacks such as Cross-Site Scripting and SQL Injection attacks.

Stability

Exposes liveness data for monitoring via third party tools or services (e.g http://pingdom.com/)

Performance improvements release: TOOLIP has now even higher performance (can serve 3.5 million dynamic pageviews/day)

 

System & Performance

System management and Caching

The performance of each TOOLIP installation is heavily benefited by caching of information that is reused. This cache is also manageable by administrators allowing both automated and manual re-caching. A full suite of management actions give the higher-tier technical administrator full access to system vitals and statistics, performance indicators and schedulers as well as to more complex administrative and content management actions (scheduled tasks, inter-portal cloning of information, mass updates, etc.) that should not be performed by basic level content managers.

Protection against malicious acts and attacks

Information security is not to be taken lightly. TOOLIP implements all Top 10 web application security recommendations from OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project). TOOLIP powered websites and data are, therefore, protected from malicious acts and attacks such as Cross-Site Scripting and SQL Injection.

Session Management

The system maintains a session for each user who logs in. This session can be kept alive in the system for a pre-defined amount of time. It can also be traced and managed by administrators providing useful support in conjunction with the powerful audit trail engine.

User Interface / Usability

Advanced File Management System

TOOLIP offers an internal repository for file uploads. The mechanism is customizable to impose restrictions to size and file extensions.

CK Editor (WYSIWYG rich text editing)

This commonly used editor sets the foundation for advanced rich text content editing. CKEditor is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, which means that the text being edited on it looks as similar as possible to the results users have when publishing it. It brings common editing features found on desktop editing applications like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice to the web. 

Document Management System (DMS)

File Management is extended by this feature to offer light DMS functionality. Files can be encapsulated in richer entities that allow for further defining metadata and a library back-office. The encapsulating entities can also be multilingual and automatically updated with newer versions of the documents (versioning).

Integrated simple and advanced full-text search

Based on the Apache Lucene open source text searching library, TOOLIP has a deeply integrated text searching mechanism that can be fully parameterised and customised. This powerful library provides the base for an extensible engine which includes ranking of search results ("best" results first), proximity searching (measuring the distance between matching terms within a document), fuzzy searching (as opposed to exact word matching), search suggestions ("Did you mean...?") etc.

Integration with external information publishing subsystems 
(e.g. meteorological or stocks information)

The architecture can easily integrate input of information from external sources by either directly caching/presenting them or transforming and integrating them to TOOLIP entities and structures. In addition, information can be exchanged in various B2B scenarios.

Internal messaging system

Besides the standard email notification system which can be customised to notify users on specific events/actions, TOOLIP also has an integral messaging system that allows logged in users to contact each other, especially in collaborative environments that have users remotely working with the system. This messaging system allows for a history of discussions to be kept, as well as an integration with the content management allowing users to directly inform each other on specific actions needed on specific portal pages.

E-Learning

Course Management system

This feature extends TOOLIP to incorporate functionality form E-Learning suites. Users can be broken down to appropriate Roles (teaching or participating roles for example), Courses can be published, subscribed to and managed by this feature. Further functionality can be extended again by the integration with other TOOLIP features (e.g. with the Document Management System for uploading coursework or the Students Management System).

Students Management system

Toolip User Management can also be extended by this feature to provide functionality more inherent with E-Learning environment. User information can extend to incorporate grading, grouping of users (students by class or course), etc.

Social Exposure