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)

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 :)

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