TCENet – Our intranet portal

       Hello folks, a post on something that has taught me and a few others a lot. The TCENet project of this great instituition. TCENet is the intranet portal of Thiagarajar College of Engg., one of the most popular colleges in Tamilnadu. The speciality of this project is that it is being developed exclusively by the students of the college with the non- stop support from the alumnis and staff. Another important piece of information worth mentioning is that TCENet is totally FOSS based.

In TCENet, we use python, an extremely user friendly object oriented language along with Cheetah, a template engine written in python. The database used is Postgres. Initially, the TCENet project ran on proprietary platform with the Oracle database, but now it runs on a Debian GNU/Linux server. It all began with the necessity of a intranet portal felt by the students and staffs alike and so a few students of the Dept. of Copmuter Science started doing working on it. Started as a simple intranet portal, TCENet now provides a whole lot of services to the students and staff.

The TCENet is being developed within the walls of PP lab or the UNIX lab, where a group of students, comprising of second, third and final years, sit back after college hours and work for a few hours. But, the most important thing to be noted is that, it is not just development of the site that takes place, but huge amounts knowledge transfer. But for the people here, I would have never knoe the spirit of FOSS, the power of GNU/Linux or opensolaris. I would have never used python and above all, never would have got an opportunity to work on servers that are comparable with those in the industry and work 24×7.

A services provided by the TCENet team are listed here:

• A Centralised  Authentication System (single sign-on) using kerberos, LDAP and Samba for the entire college.
• The TCENet, college intranet portal, developed using python+postgres.
• The TCEMail, our own mail service, using Exim and Cyrus with SquirrelMail.
• An alumni portal for the use
• The TAMS, an attendence monitorin and leave management system for staff.

The various services provided by the TCENet web portal includes attendence monitoring for students and daily students’ attendence updating for staff, e-circulars, an issue tracking system, submitting feedbacks on lectureres by the students and so on.

These apart, the people here have done a lot of work in the field of operating systems. A few OS/kernels developed by the people who were a part of the PP lab include AAOSK, GoaTee/ProX, Quark etc. GoaTee/ProX is being developed still with the addition of a lot more features.

Also a few people worth mentioning are Gerald Naveen, Joe Steeve, Ananth Shrinivas, Arun Ponniah, Balamurugan, Senthil Kumaran, Praveen, Senthil Kumaran, Subramani, Sriram and others.

A Few screenshots:

TCENet

TCEMail