School Intranet

[sven]

Hi everyone,

Just a quick question regarding how you use your internal intranet sites. I am in the process of making a nice shiny new one, but what I want to know if how many you have. Do you have a separate intranet site for students and teacher, or do they all get pushed to the same site when they open a browser?

The reason I ask is because I'm not keen on having 2 separate sites to maintain, but I can see the advantage of being able to pick and choose what I target to either audience.

What do you guys think?

Regards,

Sven.

[CyberNerd]

Intranet is very last decade.
Everything should be on the internet these days.
Think 'intranet' as the password protected bit of the internet.
We put all our internal stuff either on Moodle (behind password) or on the Google domain. Everything else is internet.

You could extend you main website so that it has a staff login and student login area. either way you have less to look after and staff/students have greater access when off site.

[AngryTechnician]

You could extend you main website so that it has a staff login and student login area. either way you have less to look after and staff/students have greater access when off site.

Consider very carefully the sort of information you make available in such a fashion. Some data information should be kept separate, and possibly not accessible from home at all.

Just a few months ago a school was criticised for a Data Protection breach because their externally-available MIS was secured with the same passwords as their public website. The website passwords were exposed, and subsequently the MIS. I can only imagine what the ICO would have to say if it had actually been on the same system and there was a breach.

[sven]

Well the site is only really to be used as an internal news site, so that any announcements that need to be made to all users can be displayed there.

[AngryTechnician]

Ours is one site that identifies users by their logon and shows different information depending on the user. That way I only have to maintain one backend and style, and only have to tailor the staff-only bits.

[sven]

Ours is one site that identifies users by their logon and shows different information depending on the user. That way I only have to maintain one backend and style, and only have to tailor the staff-only bits.

This is exactly what I was thinking about doing. What solution do you use for that, or is it something you have made yourself?

[CyberNerd]

Consider very carefully the sort of information you make available in such a fashion. Some data information should be kept separate, and possibly not accessible from home at all.

Just a few months ago a school was criticised for a Data Protection breach because their externally-available MIS was secured with the same passwords as their public website. The website passwords were exposed, and subsequently the MIS. I can only imagine what the ICO would have to say if it had actually been on the same system and there was a breach.

Ours is one site that identifies users by their logon and shows different information depending on the user. That way I only have to maintain one backend and style, and only have to tailor the staff-only bits.

Are we not doing the same thing then?

[krknight]

Hi
My preferred option is for a internet platform that is installed on your school servers. The best i have come across is SharePoint 2010. Foundation is pretty damn good for the basics and is free from microsoft. However, for the more data driven approach I would try enterprise. Its an excellent system and can capture and analyse pupil data as well as integratingg seemlessly into your network. It can be branded to match your school colour scheme and design using themes, master pages and CSS. It is excellent for posting announcements, shared calendars and uploading lists straight from excel. As an added bonus it works perfectly with access, excel, powerpoint and word.

Hope this helps.

Keith
Novotronix

[jdoyle]

Well the site is only really to be used as an internal news site, so that any announcements that need to be made to all users can be displayed there.

my old Intranet page was a news page. When users connected, a quick check to see if the user was in the Student AD group, query to SQL to display news items tagged as Student. If in Staff AD group, quick query to SQL to display news items tagged as Staff.

I had a simple page for adding news items, tagging the content as internal or external, staff or student (and a few others as well) and that drove my Intranet and website.

Now using Sharepoint 2007 for the Intranet. Still use AD to control who sees what.

Kept internal for security and speed.

[Marci]

One site... with Moodle (with LDAPCapture plugin) for protected content. Limited MIS Data available via Moodle. No passwords held on webserver. All auth is passed thru to AD by LDAP without caching passwords. If webserver is compromised, no-one's passwords are exposed.

[AngryTechnician]

Are we not doing the same thing then?

Not quite. When you log in to our Intranet from home, there is no access to the MIS system even if you log in as staff.

[Sylv3r]

We use Sharepoint.

Depending on the associated groups of the user, they see various elements to their homepage. Staff / Student announcements etc.

[glennda]

We use custom coded site - has links to submit jobs (web forms submitted via email to helpdesks) for Central Admin tasks - IT Support - Premises. Has the Ability to request cover (again via email). It also has a submitable noticeboard which is now used instead of all staff emails - for this we have 5 views - Student View only, Staff View Only, Sixthform only, Student/Staff/Admin/6thform, Admin Only. Then depending on AD groups they get the relevant posts.