The 471 schools of the Paris region (officially referred to as 'Île-de-France region') that are to be involved in the portal project that was announced in October 2009 will be using Eliot, a web-based workflow software that was originally developed for three schools of the region.
On 19 October 2009, the government of Île-de-France signed a €19.6 million six-year contract with several IT services providers for the design, implementation and management of the workflow portal.
The portal will be accessed by about one million users, including 400 000 schoolchildren. This makes it one of Europe's biggest open source projects, one of the IT services providers said in a statement.
The portal software Eliot is developed by about seventy developers. Eliot is built on top of open source components such as the relation database management system PostgreSQL, the Apache web server and the Tomcat Java application server.
The workflow portal can be accessed using no more than a web browser. It allows the system to be up to date, in technology as well as in applications, explained Olivier Vigneau, project manager at one of the IT services providers, in the statement published by the company. "The majority of applications used five years from now, are yet to be imagined."
