satrap

Welcome to the official homepage of satrap!

What is satrap?

satrap is a web-centered approach to managing all the different data about members of an organization of almost any kind and size.

Errm, what?

satrap could be thought of simply as an address book for your club, society, faculty, department or company. But that's not all it is, it can do so much more: A powerful system of groups and roles allows you to configure satrap to work exactly the way you want: You can decide which groups of members are allowed to see which other groups, as well as give certain groups (partial) administrative rights.

Let's illustrate this:

In a simple setup, there might be some departments of your club or company that you want to keep rather separated, so you would allow the members of each department to only see the people in their own one. However, there would also be some managers which are of course allowed to see and edit data of all members, and also store some additional administrative information about them, which should not be publicly visible. This could be easily realized in satrap by adding people to groups and choosing the appropriate roles between these groups.

However, much more complex setups are possible:

First of all, people will usually be in several groups, so they will have different roles; for example, managers would usually belong to a department as well. Then, of course, you may imagine different groups of managers which have access to different data of selected groups, which can be exactly represented by appropriate roles. Other roles could be community functions like access to a shared forum or to certain bits of news, all of which has already been readily implemented.

Why would you want to use satrap? (Intended Audience, but also tells you how this all works)

• You can use satrap if you simply want to keep an online address book of your friends and family, making use of the powerful group system that allows you to organize your contacts not only into disjunct groups as in many other systems, but into as many groups as you wish, without duplicating any information; and also add whole groups to other groups, which comes in handy more often than you might expect. Furthermore, you can keep any number of addresses per person, and a lot of attention has been paid to details such as proper fields for instant messenger usernames, country codes and so much more.
• However, the full potential of satrap will be unleashed only if you also allow your contacts to login into your installation as well. The first benefit of that will be that they will be able to keep their personal information up-to-date without any work from your side. But that's only the beginning:
• If you now allow people in certain groups to see the other members of their own or different groups, you get a kind of shared address book, which provides a lot more motivation to update their details regularly, because in doing so they can now make sure a lot more people can get their most recent contact data.
• So actually, the full power of satrap lies in its community aspect: Groups of people that want to stay in contact.
• But as has been pointed out before, the special point about satrap is that it doesn't just allow one group, but as many as you wish -- with a smaller or larger overlap of members -- with some groups potentially being subgroups of others -- and whatever else you might imagine really, thus allowing you to map any real-life constellation to those groups.
• So we assume that the full power of satrap will be accessed when a group of people want to allow each other to quickly contact them.
• And again, this need not be a homogenous group of people at all, but may consist of many subgroups. Some subgroups would probably visible to others, but some might also want to grant others groups only partial access, or none at all.
• So in a company or society, you might want to allow the managers to see everyone's full details, while allowing normal members to see only some information about each other.
• It is also possible to allow each user to specify on their own how public they want to make their own details. That way people concerned about their privacy may opt to not disclose their cell phone number to everyone, while still having it in the database, so managers can contact them in an emergency.

What makes satrap so unique?

satrap was actually started as a publicly available project because we believed (and still believe) that there was no open-source application out there allowing you to have a properly organized (broken down into groups) address database, especially not one suitable for communities (of such different variety as listed above!). There are loads and loads of content management systems that allow you to perfectly organize website content and give users and groups fine-grained access rights to edit those web pages, but we have not seen a single system which treats the users as the fundamental entities. That is why we started satrap.

IMPORTANT - PLEASE NOTE:

satrap is still in a phase of heavy development and just now undergoing a complete restructuring and refactoring of its code. Thus it is denoted as alpha and we do not at all recommend it for any form of production use. Still feel free to take a look at the current code and send us any ideas, suggestions, bug reports, all preferably via our SourceForge project page. Also, we are still looking for even more developers, so feel free to contact us about that as well :)