Is anyone involved with a company intranet? We’re looking to set something up, more a sort of electronic noticeboard than a formal message from company to staff. So people need to be able to post stuff to it with a minimum of intervention from whoever maintains the site.

I’m kind of volunteering as I need to learn more about this area. I’ve built really basic stuff using html, but does anyone know if there’s some sort of application out there that allows a free-and-easy approach where people can just pop their own text or pics on a site?

Might even use it to organise a company bike ride, there’s a few of us!

just try one of the freeware forums.

most don’t need much technical know how to get up and running and if it’s on an intranet it’ll be the ‘right side’ of a firewall so security won’t be too much of an issue.

It depends on the type of technology your web and database servers are running (or more importantly if you actually have web and database servers running!!).

You first need to know if your running linux-apache-mysql-php (LAMP) or Microsoft .Net and SQL server, or something else entirely.

Find that out and I’m sure we can offer some options.

We use mediawiki (it’s wikipedia) and allow everyone to edit their own stuff. Works fine for a 150+ company.

E-mediacolour did me one, externally hosted for our sales force so over 1000 users. It has the look and feel of the BBC website but users can go on and update their own news and blog with pictures. its great, but it wasn’t very cheap.

** Post Hijack ***

Gjglover. Interested in your solution. One of my guys is investigating this at the moment as we would like an intranet but due to the acquisitive nature of the business we have several domains.
We are looking into hosting our intranet externally.
Did you have any issues?
Do you have contact details of the company used?

You could go the wiki route, or you could also consider using googlesites – obviously this stores info off site so you need to think about security issues but if you’re really just after something relatively basic but hassle free which people can update easily then it might be ideal.

If you’re running Windows 2003 you can download Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0. This will allow you to create a fairly comprehensive intranet. But it is admin heavy.

We run a mixture of Macs and PCs, I really don’t know the underlying architecture, but Mr IT will be back in the office tomorrow. I just wanted to be a bit more informed on the software front before I broach it with him.

Thanks for all the suggestions – glad to know it’s possible. The wiki route may be the best. Security is important, this should NOT be visible to clients or competitors as we may be discussing pitches for future work etc.

The IT man will be able to sort out any considerations of firewalls, languages etc, but I feel I’m not asking the impossible anymore.

Thanks!

Surfer

http://www.e-mediacolour.co.uk/

No issues so far, we even FTP the daily sales over to them and they display each of the reps sales and order status for them in a litle app.

The site is just a www. url and the reps have a password and log on id

Thanks for that!

I’ve used punBB to set up a basic forum site. You’ll need Apache setup with PHP and MySQL though. My ISP had this setup so it took about an hour to get the whole thing up and running.

http://punbb.informer.com/

…I run Sharepoint in house as our company solution – the free version like RooleyMoore suggests, although it’s not great for people to be able to add things like pictures to posts.

Although having played with WordPress (www.wordpress.org) I’d be quite tempted to run this as an intranet, it’s all free and you can ask your IT guy to install a flavour of (free) Linux on a spare box to run it on.

pbr – I think Microsoft left those features out of the free version so you had to buy the full MOSS 2007 solution and create a publishing site. It would only cost you £80K upwards… (depending on users and internal/external access)

Joomla (or Mambo) and DotNetNuke are pretty good (depending on platform/database support).

We use Sharepoint for organisation of 450 ish. The techy snobs sneer, but it is easy to train people on and maintain and cost naught. Well not quite as we had to get some development work to make it look nice but it was not expensive.

If your using a Microsoft backend you could try something like DotNetNuke, you just install it and manage the content yourself, pretty straightforward and I’m certain mr IT will more than capable of getting it up and running. Its open source so I wouldn’t recomend it for an internet site, but its fine as an intranet.

The latest version of DotNetNuke doesnt require a SQL server installation either, it will run from an attached database instance that should run as part of the standard configuration.

I’ve not had a great deal to do with Sharepoint but from what I remember sharepoint has “discussion lists” and “Discussion Database” features (i.e. the sharepoint version of a forum) but they’re poor at best and would certainly dissapoint users with their lack of functionality.

DON’T USE SHAREPOINT
Horrendous coming from a (T)Wiki. Much of the stuff’s stored as Word or Excel docs. A real pain to edit and format.

We just moved to Sh**epoint 2007, and it looks slightly better in terms of features, but still gash compared to a Wiki, for collaboration purposes.

We noticed an incredible drop in people updating help pages and “how-to” guides after we moved from Twiki to Sharepoint. They just couldn’t be arsed opening up Word every time, or using the crap rich-text editor.

I’ve seen 2 good solutions: one is a Wiki. Pfizer uses one – 10000+ users.
The other is an open blog / series of blogs with little restriction on the users, with RSS feeds to push the appropriate content to whoever.

Sharepoint’s guff for non-Windows, non-Internet Explorer users. They have two-tiers of functionality – one for Windows/IE/Office and one for ‘all the other stuff’.

Gits.

Aha, I gather we’re using Joomla. Anyone know it?

Yep I agree about sharepoint. it’s horrid. Especially when it falls over and you have all the files stored as external blobs. Who ever thought of storing all the documents inside sql server should be shot.

Glad I don’t have anything to do with it anymore! 🙄