Creating an intranet with media gallery

[sadams1980]

Hi all,

I need a bit of advice. I am looking to build a intranet site for the school, but i dont know what to use to create the site. I was thinking Sharepoint.

I also want to include in this a room booking system (MRBS) and a media gallery (a youtube style one would be good. Any advice on this, preferably free?). I also want to have seperate views for staff and students.

I have looked at Joomla, Sharepoint and wordpress. I am leaning towards Sharepoint.

Cheers
Sean

[Danp]

I went with Joomla and love it. We dont really have any media stuff on there at the moment, but we could if need be.

[unixman_again]

We use Helix Media Server for our media gallery. The interface is very youtube like and if you access a video it will show to code to either link to it or embed it in a webpage. The embed works well for us in Moodle. The downside it isn't free and it can be touchy with mp4's. I don't know why and I can't figure out how to switch on logging for the conversion process. To get around this, I convert the mp4 to avi and it works fine.

As to Sharepoint, avoid like the plague. It is a very big sledgehammer to crack a very small nut. We use it for our intranet and administering it is a right pain. We used to use Moodle and secretaries found it very easy to key data such as daily notices, minutes of meetings, etc. Under SP this is a real pain. The process to do it directly is way to complicated and the only way to make it easy for the non-IT literate is to have them save a word document as HTML and then use an appropriate webpart to pick it up. This still causes no end of problems; "Why has it changed by font?", "I need to call my file yyyy.doc not xxxx.html and the website doesn't find it", etc. I'd advise Moodle, Joomla, Wordpress, or a cork pinup board. You'll have far less problems.

[sadams1980]

Thanks for the replies. I was looking at gallery server pro as a media gallery it is web-based so could be accessed as an external source or within chosen intranet site.

Unixman im unsure now what to go with. I had a quick play with Joomla a while ago and couldnt get on with it. Maybe i need to sit down longer with it. Moodle i have never played with before, has anyone else used this for their intranet?

Any more opinions on what to use for our intranet creation would be helpful?

Thanks