With its interactive web-portal solutions, DITS aims to provide its customers with the means to communicate, both within their organization using, a portal as an intra- / extranet; and with their target audiences, their funders and other stakeholders, using a portal as a public interactive web-site.

Web-sites developed in South Africa, are almost without exception designed as tools for disseminating information and not for interactive sharing of information. Little use is being made of, so called, Content Management Systems (CMS), which implies that updating and publishing new information generally takes quite a lot of time and requires the intervention of a web-master.

Large private companies in the media market are an exception, but they still use their CMS’s solely for the dissemination of information. Some initiatives by the national government (see www.oss.gov.za) and some NGO’s (see www.fossfa.org) do succeed in creating virtual communities where visitors really interact with each other regarding the interests they share. In South Africa more often the term WMS (Web content Management System) is used instead of CMS.

DITS’ interactive web-portals are a few steps ahead. Apart from disseminating information and assisting virtual communities in their needs to interact, DITS’ portals currently offer online contact-, document-, project-management, while more services are under development. All the systems we build are based on Open Source Software (OSS). This means:

• less development time and costs,
  
  
• the core of our systems is maintained and updated by an international community of developers for free,
  
  
• no software-vendor-lock-in occurs, our clients are not dependent on costly (additional) licenses, office suites, or even on using our services if they feel some other company might do a better job,
  
  
• modifications and extensions can be done to these software modules, as the source codes are freely available, and their licenses permit to do so, which
  
  
• ensures that our portals comply with the recommendations made by the South African ‘National Advisory Council on Innovation’ regarding ‘Open Software & Open Standards in South Africa’ in the Public Sector.
  
  

Using OSS will enable our competitors to copy our systems, but we think the combination of smart systems design, the integration of solutions not being offered by others, the understanding of the needs of our customers, our knowledge in the field of social sciences and development in South Africa, our track record in our target market, and our pricing strategy will persuade our customers to choose DITS’ portal solutions.

We offer the development of our portals at higher costs compared to traditional static web-sites, but at lower costs compared to our competitors in the South African market of CMS’s. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for our customers will almost always be lower since the costs of web-masters involved in updating and adding new content are eliminated. We provide hosting facilities of our portals through partners, where we rent managed and shared LAMP (LINUX, Apache, MySQL, PHP) servers.