Monclaire Marketing

Many developers and organizations have used Drupal to develop corporate websites, news portals, and online communities, but I’ve yet to see any intranet being built on the Drupal platform.  I’m sure there are intranets out there that were built using Drupal.  They just aren’t documented for public viewing or they may be using Open Atrium or Acquia Commons, Drupal installation profiles for intranet or group collaboration.

I’ve tried the “intranet out of the box” version developed from Open Atrium and Acquia Commons, but I wasn’t too impressed with the user interface.  It looked complicated for novice users, especially in a non-profit organization.  These products are also limited when it comes to designing your own custom look and feel.  For this reason, I wanted to build an intranet using Drupal to explore the capabilities of the product and to see whether it was a good solution for small to medium sized companies and non-profits.  I’ve chosen to use Drupal 7 because of its cleaner user interface and built in modules such as Views, CCK, and image handling capabilities.  Plus I didn’t want to have to upgrade the intranet within 2-3 years when the community decides to phase out Drupal 6.

Before I started building the intranet, I had to figure out what features are required for an intranet and what features are nice to have.  Below are some of the features I felt was necessary for an intranet of any size:

• Pages – for company and departmental pages
• Blogs – for employee blogs
• Calendar – listing of company events and announcements
• Document library – a place to search for forms, downloads, policies and procedures
• Books – to develop online documentation in structured form
• Site Search – for searching pages, posts, and documents
• Roles & Groups – must have the ability to create custom user groups and roles
• Security – each page/post/document can be restricted to roles, user(s), or group

Nice to have features:

• Discussion forum
• Chat
• In/Out Board to list employee statuses
• Publishing videos

Within two months while working on this intranet and other projects, I was able to developed a functional and decent looking intranet for my organization using Drupal 7 and a handful of contributed modules.  The intranet design was the Duplex theme from a Antsin.com.  Overall, I’m quite happy with the intranet so far considering the cost and how long it took me to develop an intranet from conception to implementation, less than two months.  What do you think?  Is Drupal the best solution for an intranet over other open source solutions or commercial offerings?  In future posts, I will list all the modules that I used to develop the intranet if there are enough people interested.