UNIVATES, a university centre committed to Free Software development

HIGHER education institutions aim at the advancement of human knowledge and the dissemination of such knowledge. Free software is completely aligned with this task.

UNIVATES, a university centre located in the city of Lajeado, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), has adopted Free Softwareas the basis for its intranet/Internet servers since 1997.

BY END 1999, Univates started the development of SAGU (Portuguese acronym for Sistema Aberto de Gestao Unificada, or Open Unified Management System). SAGU went live in July 2000 and is now responsible for managing the academic and financial relationships between students and the varsity. Incidentally, SAGU is also the name of a delicious local dessert!

EVEN BEFORE SAGU went live, Univates demonstrated its commitment to Free Software development by publishing the full source code of SAGU on the Internet, allowing the coders' community to see it evolving. It also provided technology-transfer workshops.

UNIVATES has saved more than R$500,000 (about US$ 130,000) by *not* acquiring copies of proprietary software for servers and desktops. It saves R$200,000 (US$70,000) each year on software upgrades and maintenance. This is enough to pay the salaries of the development group. Meaning, Univates can effectively produce technology for its own use (and which others can also make use of) at virtually no cost!

THE UNIVATES IT Group is now recognised as the most important centre of excellence in Free Software development in Brazil.

SOME OF ITS projects:

o MIOLO, a set of PHP-based object-oriented database connectors, handlers and presentation features that allow fast system development even for the most complex needs

It handles transaction and communication between modules written using MIOLO, thus making life easier for a programmer who wants to build a system with several interdependent modules.

http://miolo.codigolivre.org.br

o EasyPHP: a no-database, hassle-free tool for creating simple web presence with an easy-to-use administrative tool.

o QUALITAS: document control for quality management systems

o PILA, bookstore system with front-end point-of-sales, stock, catalog and financial sales reports.

o FRED (content management system), a full-featured system for creating services portals for MIOLO-based applns. o IRRATIONAL TULIP: A group of classes and tools for MIOLO application development, such as dia2sql (converts database diagrams into SQL database creates and inserts), MIOLO-IDE (an IDE for developing GTK applications using MIOLO).

o CODIGOLIVRE2: Hosting and tools for cooperatively developed Free Software.A MIOLO version of the existing http://codigolivre.org.br (a SourceForge Brazilian fork maintained by UNIVATES).

o SCOTTY, support calls and customer relationship tracking, management and statics system.

GNUTECA http://gnuteca.codigolivre.org.br GNUTECA is a library automation and catalog-collaboration system. It includes a circulation control system and, when used in an educational institution, it integrates with SAGU (though it also works as a standalone). It is intended to go a step further from the existing (gratis, but not Free Software) UNESCO CDS/ISIS program, and it does provide an easy migration path from it. GNUTECA adheres to all widely-used library standards. It now handles over 80,000 library items offered to over 6,000 students and teachers.

GNUDATA http://gnudata.codigolivre.org.br This started as the database support for their regional database which provides demographic and economic information of 40 cities in the Taquari River Valley. It is a database framework for implementing nearly every kind of database in which you need to get comparative/statistical information (demographics, etc). It has a 'query auto-pilot' which allows non-technical users to drill down the database searching for all kinds of stored data. It does percentages and other calculations which the user may want to include in queries. The development version also provides graphics.

SAGU - Free Software for academic administration http://sagu.codigolivre.org.br It automates the relationship between students and their educational institution, from the moment a student enrols for an entrance exam until she graduates.

SAGU subsystems try to mimic the functions of the university. So it has modules that handle the entrance exam (optical reading of the student's answers, classification, classroom assignment), the enrolment process (which courses the student may chose for a given term, pre-requisites), the academic data (grades, academic history), financial and accounting data (payments, credits, scholarships, interface with the bank and other accounting/ERP systems) and reporting tools. Today, SAGU is being rewritten using Object Orientation techniques... (MIOLO is also the Portuguese word for the inner part of the bread, as well as a brand of a very fine wine produced in southern Brazil!)

AGATA REPORT http://agata.codigolivre.org.br Agata Report is a report generator with an EIS tool (graph generation) written in PHP-GTK that allows you to edit and get SQL results from several databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, SyBase, MS-SQL, FrontBase, Informix, and InterBase). It connects to a database, lists its tables and fields, and allows you to link among tables... The result is exported to a PostScript, text file or spreadsheets. It's interface has English, Portuguese, Italian, French, German and Swedish support....

More details from Cesar Brod <cesar at brod.com.br> www.univates.br or sagu at univates.br