• Introduction
• Index
• About this Book
• Why Sahana Eden?
• What Does Sahana Eden Do?
• Who Uses Sahana Eden?
• Technical Overview
• Planning a Deployment
• Getting Started
• Installation
• Configuration
• Importing Data
• Localization
• Administration
• Maintenance
• Data Export
• Extending Sahana Eden
• Installing a Developer Environment
• Customization
• Building a New Module
• Further Reading
• Meeting The Sahana Community
• Sahana Software Foundation
• Getting Support
• Getting Involved
• Contributing Code
• Where to Go Next
• Appendices
• Resource Model
• Mapping & GIS
• Scheduler
• Synchronization
• Web Services
• S3XML
• Glossary
• Credits

Why Should You Use Sahana Eden?

Sahana Eden is an open source software platform which has been built specifically for Disaster Management. It is highly configurable so that it can be used in a wide variety of different contexts and is easy to modify to build custom solutions. Different levels of support are available from both the voluntary Sahana Eden community and professional companies.

Training of Teachers of Pune University on Disaster Management

Built for Disaster Management

Sahana Software was initially developed by members of the information technology (IT) community in Sri Lanka to provide solutions for the relief effort following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Sahana Eden is the latest evolution of this software and provides a solution to manage organizations, people, projects, inventory and assets as well as collecting information through assessments and providing situational awareness through maps.

Sahana Eden can be accessed from the web or locally from a flash drive, allowing it to be used in environments with poor internet. Local & Web versions can be configured to synchronize to allow data to be shared between them.

These features are designed to help Disaster Management practitioners to better mitigate, prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters more effectively and efficiently. Sahana Eden can provide valuable solutions for practitioners in Emergency Management, Humanitarian Relief and Social Development domains.

Community and Professional Support

Sahana Eden is a project of the Sahana Software Foundation, whose mission is:

To help alleviate human suffering by giving emergency managers, disaster response professionals and communities access to the information that they need to better prepare for and respond to disasters through the development and promotion of free and open source software and open standards.

The project is supported by a voluntary community of Disaster Management practitioners, students, academics and companies. This community is able to provide a basic level of support to help you deploy and configure Sahana Eden. There are also companies, such as AidIQ, who provide professional services to customize and support Sahana Eden.

Highly Configurable and Easy To Modify

Sahana Eden is designed to be rapidly configured and customized to support the diverse business processes used within Disaster Management. Sahana Eden's modular design allows different pieces of functionality to be enabled and disabled as required providing flexible solutions for changing contexts.

The application can be configured to secure sensitive information, while also making data which needs to be shared available in a variety of different formats including Microsoft Excel and PDF. To ensure that Sahana Eden is accessible to every country, it can be translated into multiple languages.

Finally, Sahana Eden is licensed under the Open Source MIT License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php), making it free to download, customize and modify without any restriction or reliance on any single vendor. The MIT License also places no restriction on the commercial or closed deployments of the software, giving the greatest flexibility for the use of Sahana Eden in sensitive environments.