This page contains background info about the various versions of intranet we have used over the years. It also contains some information about the status of transition of material from old sites to this one.
expertsupport.com is our public site. expertsupport.us is our private intranet site. These two sites are current.
There are many sources of information targeted to expertsupport staff members:
- expertsupport.us. (The site you are on now.) This is the current intranet site. New material will appear on this site. We will migrate old material here. Eventually, the others below will be de-commissioned.
- training.expertsupport.us. This site contains courses that we use for internal training. For example, there is a course called “XS Orientation” that we have all new employees take.
- Our old intranet at esi.xs.com. There is still some information there. Some of it is out of date, but often there is not yet a replacement for the old content. We are working on moving it all here. The link is broken as of 11/27/2019. I might resurrect it, but maybe not.
- Our newer, but seldom used, intranet site at xsfor.us. Once upon a time, I used this site to update information formerly on the old site. So some newer content appears there. But mostly, this is for internal operations, such as how to do various administrative tasks. I haven’t been able to convince others to use it, so I gave up. Lots of this has moved.
Security on the sites
Each of these have different mechanisms for protecting the content.
expertsupport.us
This site has a proper registration and login system. You already have credentials to this site or you wouldn’t be reading this. 🙂
training.expertsupport.us
This site has a proper registration and login system. You should have credentials here too. They are different sites, with (possibly) different credentials. You can keep the two sites in sync, but that’s up to you.
esi.expertsupport.us (no longer available)
We protect esi.xs.com with a password-protected directory. There is one set of credentials. If you know those, you can get in. The username is “esistaff” (without the quotes, of course). Ask somebody for the password if you don’t know it.
One of the reasons that I’d like to get out of this site is that this is an insecure way to protect content. There’s no way to remove access, for example, without changing the credentials and telling everybody about the change.
This site is no longer available.
xsfor.us
This site is run on an open-source application called Moodle. It is designed for a distance-learning environment, in which there are classes, teachers, and students. It has lots of features that manage privileges and access. For example, teachers can change content that students can’t. Teachers can only change content in their own courses. You can’t see stuff in a course with which you’re not enrolled. Mapping the privilege and access mechanisms for our purposes has been pretty attractive.
I have tried, unsuccessfully, to get people interested in using this site instead of the old esi.xs.com site. Many of the key people are sufficiently turned off by the Moodle UI that they don’t like using it. The combination of that problem and the fact that Moodle is not easy to administer means that this site is a dead end. Most of the info on this site has been moved to expertsupport.us. We are keeping it alive just in case we missed moving something important. (And because Denny is a pack rat for old information.)
wiki.xsfor.us (no longer available)
We created this wiki site for two reasons: to support collaboration among our writers in developing content for our website, and to explore using MediaWiki.
After the site had been up for a while, we got a bunch of spam registrations and spam pages. So we put a login gate on the folder that serves the wiki. The username for that gate is “esistaff”. Ask somebody for the password.
This site was deleted by Denny in September of 2020.