Paul Roeland: A decade of experiences: Intranet with a focus on security and usability

Quaive is basically a distribution of Plone with its own UI. It is for intranets, and it takes security very seriously.

Since I work at the Clean Clothes Campaign, security is very important for us. There are governments who don't like us. Having it self-hosted is also important, so they can't take our data from some cloud server.

Over 10+ years, 750 "workspaces" have been created by us in Quaive, over 200 stil active. Workspaces are the core organising units in Quaive. Each has its own security settings, governing who can see, add, edit, publish information. You can put pages in it, calendar events, etc.

Killer feature: real-time collaboration in Office documents, without needing Microsoft 365.

And, does the security concept work? We have names in there of people in the field who reported workplace problems, so whistle blowers, and we don't want this to be discovered. Safe guarding this information keeps people out of jail, and alive. In Quaive you can really configure in a simple way who has access, and if others can even know that a workspace exists.

Our use of Quaive exploded during the Covid crisis. Many brands cut their orders overnight, leaving the workers without income. Around 40 billion dollar was cancelled. We want into campaign blitz mod, mostly coordinated via Quaive, and managed to recoup 16 billion dollar. Not enough, but quite respectable for a side that doesn't hold power. And Quaive worked in countries with shaky internet connections.

Quaive also has the News section, in which we publish our internal newsletter. Great for onboarding new people in the organisation. And a library with documents that are fixed.

What did not work well? In the beginning we overcustomized. You may think you are special, but you are really not. We forced things on Quaive that it was not intended to: workspaces are not databases. We do not use the built-in message system at all: we only use Signal, and people refuse to use yet another message stream.

We do need some other tools besides Quaive. We use Nextcloud as a document store for contracts and other documents that don't need any collaboration. As a scratch pad for new documents it also works fine, before moving them to Quaive.

We use CIVICRM as a case management system. All our urgent appeals are in here, with the more free-form documents stored in Quaive.

Photos are kept in ResourceSpace, which specializes in this. Used to share with journalists as well.

If I were a rich man, what what I let Guido and Syslab and others create?

• whiteboard
• kanban boards
• landing pages
• a prettier library

Conclusions. Quaive has proved its worth in gold, and in lives. It is battle-tested, and usable for non-techie folks. Quaive is good software. It does take time to get such a wide network of people to use it. Some functions are best lect to other tools.