I have just installed the latest version of Knomos and want to share a few preliminary comments from an Australian perspective. At this stage I have done little more than install the package, and this should be borne in mind. I would like to thank the developers for making such a comprehensive package available.
Firstly, the program was I understand developed originally for Italy. Although it does support English such support is not yet complete. For example, I could not find any English Installation instructions and had to resort to machine translation of the install document that accompanies the package. This did cause some difficulties but eventually I did end up with a working installation. The next problem was that the menus were unusable. Some searching revealed that the problem was the package was unable to find the relevant style sheet, which it was expecting to find in /var/www/ rather than /var/www/Knomos. This was overcome by placing appropriate symlinks in /var/www. The language of the admin user defaults to Italian and I changed this directly in the mysql database, which seemed to work. I then created a normal user. A brief tour of the interface reveals a wealth of options. However, the design is of course tailored to Italy. Some pages of the interface are not completely translated to English. There is a list of items for costing purposes which is only in Italian and apparently relates to some sort of Italian costing tariff. The items may well be easily translated, but I'm not yet sure how useful this will be in Australia. Likewise, the fields in the database also seem to be at least partially tailored to the Italian Law and Courts. I intend to have a closer look at the package but my initial reaction is that it will need some customisation to realise its potential in Australia. This is not to say that it will not be useful at all without. For example, I am looking forward to testing the document generation features, which may present some alternative to the expensive proprietary packages currently available. I'd be interested in any thoughts others may have on this package, particularly on using it in an English language environment and in Australia or other common law jurisdictions.. regards, Darryl Barlow
