Getting Started with Kavi Software

Chapter 1. Kavi Products and Supported Software

Introduction

Kavi products are built with open source technology to serve the needs of collaborative membership organizations, with an emphasis on the particular needs of standards-setting organizations. Kavi's platform and application set is highly configurable so that it can support a wide range of operating models - adapting well to simple, informal processes and to highly structured policies.

Kavi follows the "software as services" model, delivering a complete framework to support standards organizations as enterprises on an open source platform. With a few exceptions, standards consortia are virtual; they have no physical office space or network infrastructure. These organizations depend on Kavi to host and manage their entire network and web application infrastructure. Kavi's products are an important componet of the solution "stack" for these organizations, providing flexible and powerful control to administrators who must model the organization's business rules on the web.

Figure 1.1. Kavi Solutions Stack

Diagram of the Kavi approach to product solutions.
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Kavi Products

The products with which you interact on your web site are a combination of Kavi-proprietary software based upon and integrated with third-party open source components.

Figure 1.2. Kavi Product Suite

Diagram of all Kavi products and supported third-party software.

Each of the Kavi products shown above is introduced below. Many of these products are installed on this web site and detailed documentation about them is available by clicking the "Kavi Products" tab above. For more information about a product that is not installed on this site, visit the Kavi web site or contact a Kavi support representative.

Kavi Products:

KaviŽ Members

Kavi's membership management system is the core component of all Kavi-powered web sites. Kavi Members has two primary tasks. First, it serves as an organization's member database, facilitating the membership signup and renewal process, automating and personalizing member communication, and creating member directories and company rosters. Secondly, Kavi Members controls access to private web content, keeps track of members' roles and permissions, and helps generate dynamic content for your web site. As the central location for user and company information, Kavi Members works with all the other products on the site to provide contact information and gate access to web site tools.

KaviŽ Groups

Kavi Groups is the collaborative cornerstone of many standards organizations. This collaboration application is built to support the infrastructure of distributed working groups. Kavi Groups coordinates an organization's committee work by providing protected online committee areas with tools and features designed specifically to support the committee processes necessary for standards development.

Kavi Groups includes tools to create your committee structure, manage roles and privileges, and codify rules for sharing and publishing of documents, ballots, calendar events and more. Email lists, RSS feeds, and desktop-calendar integration keep group participants informed about group activities.

KaviŽ Edit

Kavi Edit is a full-featured content creation and editing tool that makes it easy to add content and keep existing pages up-to-date. Editors can use Kavi Edit to create new pages, add navigational elements, create file downloads, and add graphics. Site administrators can restrict editing privileges to a few designated editors or distribute permission on a page-by-page basis to staff and volunteers. Changes go live as soon as they're approved. Editing can be done simply using a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) editing mode or by editing the HTML source of a page directly.

KaviŽ WebApps

Kavi WebApps and Software Developers Kit provide Kavi support personnel the ability to quickly and safely create custom database-backed forms and tools. Kavi staff have used the tools provided with Kavi WebApps to develop surveys, polls, newsrooms, job boards and other database applications to meet the specific needs of our clients. Each custom tool developed using Kavi WebApps will automatically adhere to our standards for validating the safety and quality of information stored in the database, and the usability and accessibility of the user interface.

KaviŽ Showcase

Kavi Showcase provides organizations with a browseable, searchable library of member profiles and a catalog of their compliant products. Each member company can create and maintain its own profile complete with links to its web site, a company description, and company logo. Each profile can have one or more catalog items associated with it. Catalog items are also searchable and can include a product photo, description, links to product literature and sales or marketing contact information. The site administrator can define an editor role for each company and can moderate the posting of new or changed profile content to ensure it meets the organization's standards.

KaviŽ Billing

Kavi Billing is designed to work as part of a suite of web site applications, providing billing and receipts for a variety of different tools. Kavi Billing consolidates the billing history for an account into a single place and centralizes an organization's methodology for accepting payment, creating bill IDs and other billing details. Kavi Billing interacts most prominently with Kavi Members and KaviŽ Commerce, providing membership billing for Kavi Members and integrating Kavi Commerce tools that allow members to pay bills online with a credit card.

KaviŽ Commerce

Kavi Commerce provides protected forms for collecting credit card information and integrates with payment processing gateways to process credit card payments online.

KaviŽ Mailing List Manager

Kavi Mailing List Manager includes tools for creating and managing mailing lists and email aliases. Administrators can specify public, private, moderated, and un-moderated list types, who has permission to post to each list, and the availability of web-viewable email archives. Administrators manage subscriptions by list or by member.

KaviŽ Registration

Kavi Registration features a web-based interface to a full featured and customizable event registration package. Registrants can be profiled with custom questions and custom fee structures. Kavi Registration integrates with ecommerce tools to collect credit card fees online. The administrator's interface provides the control to make modifications that become visible instantly and monitor registrations with real-time reporting.

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Third-Party Products

Kavi also supports these third-party software products on organization web sites.

Supported Third-Party Products

phpBB

phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customizable open source bulletin board package. For more information, visit www.phpBB.com.

ViewCVS

ViewCVS is a browser interface for CVS and Subversion version control repositories. ViewCVS displays revisions, change log listings, and specific versions of files as well as differences between those versions in a navigable directory. For more information, visit viewcvs.sourceforge.net.

Mantis

Mantis is a web-based comment or bug tracking system. For more information, visit www.mantisbt.org.

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