Hello,

I work for a medium-sized local government organization (approx. 4500 employees) where they are constantly sending emails back and forth concerning upcoming events and deaths of relatives of employees, creating an overload of unnecessary email in their respective mailboxes.

With respect to upcoming events, I will be weaning off the users from using email and direct them to using WebCalendar within our Intranet.

The problem still lingers with reporting deaths. I have been trying to look for an open source , web-enabled database system that is easy to use such that one or two persons from each element within our organization (typically office administrative staff, which total approximately 100) is capable of publishing that information with little or no training (we'll do a 1-2 page instruction guide if necessary, that's not a problem). Our main Intranet site would point to the system from a link. Ideally, obituaries reported over x amount of days back (say, deaths that have occurred 30 days ago or more) would be archived (automatic archiving would be a plus). This would be installed on a Linux box running Apache and Perl.

Does anyone know of such a system in existence? A Google search led to a thick brick wall.

Thank you in advance for your reply to this inquiry.

hehehe this is the most morbid thing i've seen on LQ, and references to "automatic archiving would be a plus" and " creating an overload of unnecessary email in their respective mailboxes."

not having a go, this generally made me chuckle.

Sorry i dont have any useful information for you, good luck

To ethics:

The request was not meant to be morbid nor funny (in the very sick sense). The request I have posted to linuxquestions.org is genuine and not meant to waste precious time to readers of this site.

As I stated elsewhere, we are constantly being bombarded with emails to report the passing of relatives of employees. A better way to handle these requests would be through an Intranet application of some sort.

Such an application does exist in the "closed" (non-open) world. Stateside periodicals such as The Miami Herald have a section dedicated to those who have passed. Please click here to see an example. To do a nationwide search of recently deceased individuals, please visit legacy.com.

While both of these sites have lots of features, we could make do with a little less features while still offering an easy to use and easy to maintain database of those that are not with us. For example, we don't need the ability to add click-throughs for advertisements (this is for a non-revenue local government entity).

Once again, anyone with ideas on how to accomplish this requirement on an open source basis, please reply to this thread. The funny nor the morbid need not reply.

Thank you.

I imagine that any of the content management systems out there would do the job just fine. I used php-nuke for a personal site for years. It was easy to configure and install, easy to maintain, and easy to delegate responsibility to friends with. There are a million features you probably won't want immediately, but who knows what will elvove over time!