Looking for off-the-shelf Intranet Solutions

[rich_g85]

Hi all,
At work I have become involved in a project to look at completely replacing our Intranet, preferably with an off-the-shelf package.

Apart from Microsoft SharePoint Server, I don't really know of that many packages which we can investigate.

So, what does your company use? Or, what can you suggest?

Thanks,
Richard

 

[rich_g85]

- Document repository (eg Hotel/Hire Car request forms etc)
- Communications (eg Staff news, vacancies)
- Separate sections for each department, with the ability to delegate editing permissions to nominated staff members in each department

I think the requirements are still very much under debate, but I think these will be the major ones.

 

[rich_g85]

Have a look at Moodle it has all them features. www.moodle.org It is geared towards schools/colleges, etc but we use it for out Intranet.

Sorry mate, as Moodle appears to be 'open source' it wouldn't even be considered!

 

[rich_g85]

Stupid...

(not directed at you, but at your companies policy)

'BlackBoard' is common amongst Colleges, might be worth you looking in to, but I don't know exactly which one my college was using.

Not that stupid really, we have over 1000 employees which will have the Intranet as their homepage. Imagine what happens when 'Moodle' falls over and everybody phones the Helpdesk. As second-line support, who can I phone for technical assistance in fixing a corrupt Moodle database or equivalent problem? Nobody- because it's open source and hence unsupported (apart from the online documentation).

Now do you understand the policy?!!

 

[rich_g85]

Just 'cos something's open source it doesn't mean it's unsupported - quite often there are companies who will provide you support which you have to pay for. Which is fair enough if you get the product for free anyway. I'm not saying you should use Moodle, I've never even heard of it before, but I do think the 'no open source' policy is pretty dumb - using open source can save thousands, even if some of those savings are spent on paying for third party support

Still I'm not expecting to get you marching in to the board room demanding they start using OS everything, it's pretty common for companies to not want open source things. I just disagree with entirely cutting off open source as an option.

I totally agree with you. If it were up to me, I'd roll out Firefox, OpenOffice etc to the desktop. Sadly it isn't, and I have to work within the constraints which exist.

However, I will put Moodle forward as an option. My thinking being, as this won't be a customer-facing/business critical application it's possible an exception could be made in the interests of saving money.

I will download Moodle tomorrow and have a play around with it, in between doing umpteen other jobs!