What’s the benefit of an awesome software if it’s too complex to use? Will you use google.com if, in addition to what you want to search for, you have to specify what a particular thing looks like or how you want google to search for you? The answer is no.

This year’s Google Summer of Code project “SOS Administrator” focuses on the usability of the SOS. The basic purpose of an SOS Administrator is to make SOS deployment and use as user-friendly as possible. No more editing configuration files, no more editing and saving global properties headaches !

We aim to provide two main deliverables. One is a web-based installer and the other is an administrative back-end.

Software installation is the first interaction users have with 52°North software. The better it works, the more positive feedback we have. A web-based automatic installer addresses this very topic. It will ask for minimal obligoratory information from the user, such as database connection details, and will do the rest on its own. A sneak preview of what it might look like can be seen here :

The administrative back-end supports the SOS Administration – a one-stop place for all administrative tasks, such as changing global properties (e.g. title, contact information, service type and such), dealing with database related tasks (e.g. updating/reading/deleting/hiding observations) or issuing general queries to the database. It will also include a screen for dealing with non-database related sources of feature information such as a WFS.

The “SOS Administrator” project aims to simplify the lives of SOS Administrators. Getting started easily and managing various tasks from one place will be very efficient as well as “simple”.