What's the best way to building an intranet site?

[theo_logical]

I am keen to build an intranet site for our secondary school, we have no money to spend on expert help so I have to go it alone. I envisage the site being a sharing site for staff and students, news, canteen menu, gallery for photos and videos etc, and a secure area for staff only, containing forms, room bookings and so on.

 

I have toyed with a Joomla site with some success but my stumbling block is the secure area that requires an LDAP lookup, I have spent hours configuring SHMANIC jmapmyldap, only to find it too flaky for words. As soon as I thought I had it configured correctly one minor change threw it off track, now I've lost faith in it.

 

I am wondering if someone can point me in the right direction, I am not entirely sold on Joomla, I'm quite happy to learn a new system if necessary.

 

Many thanks

[mrdolan]

Do you use Google Apps? You could probably use Google sites for most of what you want.

[m25man]

Use WSS on a windows box.. Just as easy and its AD integrated plenty of templates and users can edit/contribute using the standard MS Office applications.

You will be up and running in no time and it will let you gauge if there is any real interest before wasting half your life on a thankless exercise.

 

Whilst the WSS takes the heat off you can brush up on your moodle skills in case they really do use it!

[pcstru]

Self hosted? 'Cloud' service? Does it need to integrate with AD? What do you really, really need it for/to do? Joomla, Wordpress and other CMS are primarily about content management and delivery rather than collaboration.

 

The cynical and depressing answer might be, if you really have no money to spend on the basic fabric of a communications system, just forget it. The magic fairly dust "you can have it all for free" answer might be Google Apps for Education. Somewhere if you have money should be Sharepoint. Any which way, they are all ... ummmm, well, Theo-san likes much wrestling in a vat of tar yes?

[Marshall_IT]

We used sharepoint for years, if you want it for free you can get a version on office 365 for free.

 

There are some limitations and you won't be able to do SSO without the extra servers for ADFS but it might do what you need.

[mac_shinobi]

@webman is probably a good person to ask ( View Profile: webman - EduGeek.net )

[unixman_again]

We use Joomla for our intranet. The updates are done by people with different levels of IT experience, some that really shouldn't be let near a computer while others are very competent. I devised an LCD approach to deal with this. The updaters edit a series of M$ Word documents on a shard drive. They then save it as .doc and again as .html using the web page filtered option. These htmls are displayed on the Joomla page. We used to do the same thing when the intranet was on SP. This means the updaters don't have to contend with checking in/checking out, using an unfamiliar editor, etc. We moved to Joomla, because it allows us much more flexibility than SP. We have 4 intranets and the public facing website, all running on the same Joomla code base, and each has a unique url. SSO is handled by shibboleth, but I have no idea has to how it works as it was setup by an external company. In college, students and staff are granted automatic access to the appropriate intranets, so staff can see both staff and student pages, but students can't see the staff page. The IT services & library pages are open to both. (Here "page" refers to a Joomla site.) Outside of college, if you try to access these pages, you have to login. The public facing website is, or course, available to all.

[Oaktech]

Joomla has been my weapon of choice previously and will be again when I find a server with enough spare processing capacity.

[SovietRussia]

If you are a programmer and have couple of months free, build the entire thing yourself like I did!

 

Our Intranet is made up of a complex structure of student only and staff only content and services. One page ties them all together called Hub (1432 lines of code now), it is their homepage and centre of everything, it provides news, events, links and Google Search with prediction and history. Branching off that can be found for Staff - Mileage Calculator for submitting fuel allowances, Purchase system for ordering, Visitor system, Door Access Control, HR system, Room booking, IT Helpdesk and many more. All services sharing a common theme but the services having their own identity such as colour and options. Students don't really get a lot and its hard to work out what to give them.

 

All built in PHP, MySQL with lots of LDAP integration. This is something that can be done *easily* if you know how.

 

This took a lot of work but if you are committed, you can build something integral to your school.

 

Edited September 25, 2014 by SovietRussia

[rad]

We just have one page as a holding page before the internet.

 

I got a student to create it.

[edutech4schools]

+¹ for Google sites, its free, does lots and is easy to use. The teachers at my schools love it.