Sophisticated User Management
A Sophisticated User Management system will allow an administrator to place intranet users into categorized groups, and then define access privileges for each group. These privileges will regulate which users and groups have access to certain areas of the intranet, including content and functional areas. This is so that marketing staff can enter their time sheets (in a hypothetical situation where time sheet entry is part of an intranet), but will only be able to see their own time, whereas a Vice President will be able to enter their own time as well as view and create reports on all employees' time sheets. Most other functional components that can be personalized and customized, such as calendaring, appointment and CMS systems, would logically be integrated with a sophisticated user management application.
A system like this is recommended for more complex intranets with many users across multiple departments and lines of business. New users can just be added into defined groups according to their role in the company, and old users can be deleted from all groups in a single place.
Something to consider when discussing the need for a User Management system for the intranet is whether or not it should tie into a CMS (if one is being deployed) or other security systems. Minimizing the number of passwords employees need to remember is a good thing, but there are some security drawbacks to this, as well. Read Chapter 10 for more information on the Single Sign-On issue and general intranet security.