data storage/search tool needed

greatscott49

Beta member
Messages
1
Location
USA
I belong to an organization of about 250 people. (250 in my state, 75,000 nationally)
We have restricted (members only) web sites, both national & by state, as well as a restricted face-book site. (state)
I'm interested if there is program or process that would allow members to post/list their interests/history so others could search for those interests/history.
i.e if I want to find people in this group who were interested in say, trains, or motorcycles, or dogs, or even cocker spaniels, or Lionel Trains or Honda Motorcycles, or were in the military, Navy, or aboard the USS Kennedy, etc, how could I do that?
Each persons record/data would need to editable by them, so they could input/list their interests. (free form?) All the data would need to be accessible by everyone in the group for search. Search-able by interest/key words, and return the name/names of the people indicating they have the interest searched for.
Is there such a program or process that would allow this type of data search?
 
I don't know of any such program available right now.

Sound like you need something built.

Web based form, with a couple of fields that submits to a database that can be searched, viewed and amended. Shouldn't be more than a days work for a competent developer.

My daily rate is $500 :)
 
you could each just keep a personalised homepage on a site.

wait for it to be indexed by google and then search using google.

e.g

search
trains site:people.mystate.myclub.org

that's much easier than having a database field that needs to be hugely large to categorise interests -or a restrictive list.
 
you could each just keep a personalised homepage on a site.

wait for it to be indexed by google and then search using google.

e.g

search
trains site:people.mystate.myclub.org

that's much easier than having a database field that needs to be hugely large to categorise interests -or a restrictive list.

That is actually a very elegant solution, provided you don't mind everyone's information being accessible by the public. It's similar to a Faculty section on a university website. However, from the OP question it sounds like privacy is restricted to members-only.

This may be an obvious point, but an organisation of that size should have some sort of centralised personnel database which would therefore lend itself to storing this sort of information securely. However, such solutions are typically very old (technologically speaking - e.g. SQL) and inflexible, not to mention very custom - so your users would not find it intuitive and familiar to use.

Considering the above points, I'd recommend you take a look at the huge variety of pre-built software/service packages available at www.turnkeylinux.org - take your time to read through the descriptions and then have a go at using them. They are available as virtual machine appliances so provided you have Virtualbox/VMware (or other VM management software package) installed you're ready to go in under an hour. They all come with very good documentation and hopefully should suit what you need (oh - and they're all free!)

Once you've found a package that meets your requirements I'd suggest familiarising yourself with the configuration options to ensure you can secure it to 'members only' effectively before deploying it to an operational server in your organisation.

Good luck!
 
Back
Top Bottom