Development Approaches
Once the development team has been assembled and briefed, decisions need to be made about how the intranet will be developed. Generally, the decision comes down to whether the production is done by an in-house team, external contractors, or outsourced to an ASP (Application Service Provider). Specifically, the decision relates to a "build or buy" issue that may resolve with a decision to create a hybrid site.
There are six potential approaches to intranet development. They are:
- Develop an intranet internally with proprietary code
- Purchase an existing intranet application and customize it
- Develop a hybrid intranet with basic components (usually templates) developed in-house and other more sophisticated functional components developed by third parties.
- ASP Model (complete outsourcing)
- Open-source portal adoption
- Leverage existing enterprise technology to create an intranet or intranet components
We will look at each of these in detail now.