Once students and teachers have published their Intranet sites, how do others navigate to see them?

You can simply type the full address of someone's Intranet site in the URL bar of a browser - serveraddress/~shortusername, but this is dependent on 1) a fair bit of typing, and 2) knowing everyone's short user name!

A neater option is to create an Index page (or pages), with direct links to students' and teachers' web sites.

There are a couple of different options available to do this, depending on the size of your school, your school's Intranet setup, and it's penetration in the school.

This page provides information about the options for setting up an Index page(s) for students' and teachers' intranet web sites, hosted on a Mac OS X Server, or other Apache web server.

Scenario 1

Small school, or single class, using a Mac OSX client computer as a server, with web sharing enabled for your Intranet.
Use: SWIG to manually enter names to create your Web Index.

Scenario 2

Using an OSX Server, but only a few classes/teachers/faculties interested in using the web publishing facility.
Use: (Long term) xSUIM to automatically sync users and web index, or....
(Short term) SWIG to manually enter names to create your web index.

Scenario 3

OSX Server used across the entire school. Users regularly imported from OASIS and maintained using xSUIM.
Use: xSUIM to import your users and automatically create your Web Index.

Scenario 4

OSX Server used across the entire school. Users imported initially using xSUIM, but since maintained with individual entries in Workgroup Manager.
Use: Passenger for user management, & export to SWIG to generate your Intranet Index, or re-visit procedures and use xSUIM universally.

xSUIM

(OSX Server User Import Manager)

Developed primarily for NSW Public Schools, but could be used with other systems. (Needs Filemaker Pro). Imports users from OASIS into Workgroup Manager, as well as keeping your user accounts (and Intranet index pages) synchronised with your school's OASIS admin records.

 

SWIG
(Student Web Index Generator)

A spreadsheet that creates a web index page, providing links to student web pages on an OS X web server. Student data can be entered manually, or imported from WorkGroup Manager, via Passenger (below).

Passenger

Comprehensive tool to import and export user details to and from Mac OSX Server. You can use Passenger to export users from WorkGroup Manager, then import into SWIG to generate a web index page. Import and Export tutorial videos at this site. (Commercial - about $US60)

Web Index on Existing Server (863k - pdf)

Use Passenger to import the users from your existing Mac OS X Server, then export those users to an Intranet index page using SWIG.