Open-Source Portal Adoption
There are a number of excellent open-source internet portals and web blogs that have been developed in recent years. These applications are quite popular and can easily be deployed inside an organization specifically for intranet purposes. This type of solution will allow you to tap into a global movement of developers who are constantly improving and developing these applications for a variety of motivational factors. This means that support for technical problems is never very far and that proactive administrators who follow mailing list discussions will often be made aware of bug problems before they are ever noticed internally.
The development of these open-source portals and donation-ware blog software has been instrumental in the recent surge of community web sites. Many of these tools are quite sophisticated and include advanced CMS functionality and interactivity as part of their base installation package.
Some of the systems worth evaluating if you choose to proceed this route are:
- http://www.plone.org
- http://www.plainblack.com/webgui/
- http://www.phpnuke.org
- http://www.moveabletype.org
- http://www.drupal.org
- http://scoop.kuro5hin.org
- http://www.pmachine.com
- http://www.aenovo.com
The drawbacks of using this type of system relate to the fact that the software's full code is in the public domain. Unless an administrator in your organization is going to actively follow the development of the chosen application (through mailing lists or discussion boards), it is possible that a security issue can become publicly known and remain unfixed in your installation. This could result in a compromise of system integrity or a successful hacking attempt. Your IT team can address this by putting the intranet inside the corporate firewall, but this issue needs to be thoroughly explored before a solution like this is chosen.