New school intranet - what do you think?

As the title suggests we are in the process of creating a new intranet for our school and have come up with this for staff: Kingsmead Technology College. At the mo it's just a mockup and as such is static HTML. Some things to note tho;

1. Logon screen does not need a user or pass just press login
2. None of the links work when you are on the staff page
3. The images next to 'My Apps' when clicked presents the user with a menu (this works)
4. The room numbers (B11, E01 etc.) will load a maps of the school to show staff where it is
5. The 'No. Boys/Girls/SEN/G&T/Medical' will show a list of students with info about that student/topic area (SEN Need for example)

Any feedback positive or negative would be great.

Thanks in advance,
Mark

Please note that non of the information is real (except teachers names) and please excuse any typos.

Not sure if it's meant to, (or just me being picky), but is the Apps menu supposed to stay open constantly until you click the "open" button again? Doesn't seem to matter where you click etc won't close. Not sure if it's the layout you meant, or anything :)

May just be me but I find quite a bit of it hard to read (Not sitting too close to monitor, so may just be distant thing), but especially when some of the text right near the edge clashes with the background image etc.

Liking it though, managed to fit a lot of info onto it, without making it cluttered :)

Steve

Very nice. My only criticism is I don't like the background, it is too busy.

When users are internal will they need to authenticate themselves or are you going to set up Single Sign On(SSO)?

One other thing that you could possibly add is a Google search box at the top of the page.

Out of interest how do you get the information out and Sims and display it on your intranet?

Thanks for the feedback!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Steve21

Not sure if it's meant to, (or just me being picky), but is the Apps menu supposed to stay open constantly until you click the "open" button again? Doesn't seem to matter where you click etc won't close. Not sure if it's the layout you meant, or anything :)

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The Apps menu is supposed to stay open so people using tablets can still use the navigation system, I agree to some extent it isn't the best solution but it works

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Steve21

May just be me but I find quite a bit of it hard to read (Not sitting too close to monitor, so may just be distant thing), but especially when some of the text right near the edge clashes with the background image etc.

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and

Quote:

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Originally Posted by benjie

Very nice. My only criticism is I don't like the background, it is too busy.

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The background image is just a placeholder taken from our prospectus at the moment, we're not sure what to do with the background tbh.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by benjie

When users are internal will they need to authenticate themselves or are you going to set up Single Sign On(SSO)?

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At the moment all users will be expected to authenticate internal and external, this is basically to stop users complaining they cannot logon, you wouldn't believe some students can logon in school but forget how at home (or thats the excuse they have for not completing work). This way we know they can logon.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by benjie

One other thing that you could possibly add is a Google search box at the top of the page.

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We are hoping to tie in the search box in the top right to search Google as well as the intranet site.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by benjie

Out of interest how do you get the information out and Sims and display it on your intranet?

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At the moment we are working with our local sims team (LA) to get this data out of sims. We have written reports to get timetable, student, staff, class data from sims and using commandlineReporter it then exports the data to XML then a custom written service uploads this data to an SQL database.

Thanks again for the feedback.

In my experience the best way to set up an intranet is to use media wiki

MediaWiki

Staff/users can update it, plus everyone already knows how to use it (Wikipedia). You could also experiment with opening the site up to partner schools etc.

Think about setting something up that does not require your IT skills to maintain and grow.

If you are running on your own server then you redirect users to specialist pages that you can create with HTML but th bulk of the site can be maintained with a lower skill set.

New url as we've started some real world testing now from home: Staff - Kingsmead Technology College
@irsWorkshop - I agree that i should be easily updated by general staff via the use of a CMS type system, but these are not difficult to create in a simple form and this is the plan. The higher level stuff (application creatation) will still be done by myself such as cover, booking systems, sef, cip etc.