The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is the latest to announce their decision to build their intranet based on the open source content management platform Zope (see Royal Bank of Scotland opts for open source intranet).

RBS’s decision follows a recent string of announcements from larger organizations who chose Zope or Plone (based on Zope) to power their intranet or content management platform. Other organizations now using Plone include the BrazilianParliament, UNC Healthcare and the government of New Zealand (see www.e.govt.nz and Ministry of Women's Affairs).

Plone is emerging as the real leader in open source web platforms. Plone features enterprise content management with workflow, role-based content, a search engine and even a wiki application. Non-techies can easily use Plone with little training. The system includes templates for news, events, documents, and photos. An additional 200+ templates and tools are also available for download.

In addition to complete platforms and content management systems, there is a plethora of open source applications for plugging into your intranet including:

• Employee directory (yellow pages)
• Project management systems
• Document management systems
• Help desk
• E-Learning systems
• And many, many more

Check out FreshMeat.net and do a search on intranet for an extensive listing of available open source intranet applications.

Caution: most open source tools are not ‘plug and play’. They require a lot of care and skilled people who know how to care for them. Nor are all open source tools created equal – extensive research and care in selecting such applications is tantamount to success.

Finally, don’t put the cart before the horse:

• Identify requirements
• Build a plan
• Develop evaluation criteria
• Rate and score solution options

If open source is a new game for you or your organization, don’t hesitate to hire an outside hand (for more information contact me through Prescient Digital Media).

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Open source intranets

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Search is an absolute essential to any successful intranet. And not just a search engine, an effective search engine. If its less than stellar, the search engine will become a distraction and detraction where the most common employee complaint will continue to be "I can't find anything!"

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While the key to effective search is more focused on the rules and processes (effective page titles, strong links, keywords, summaries, meta data, etc.), the supporting technology shouldn't be overlooked.

Google is now retailing Google Mini at an entry price of $2,995 -- a highly effective solution that indexes up to 100,000 documents. Prescient Digital Media now uses Google Mini on a client site (www.HealthyOntairo.com) and we're impressed by the feature set and ability to customize results and presentation. Particularly great is Google Mini's ability to interpret misspelled words (which you can set and hardcode yourself) and the Advanced Search options (try misspelling diabetes).

To meet demand, Google has now released two larger Minis: a second that finds up to 200,000 internal documents for $5,995; a third that indexes 300,000 documents $8,995. The full Google appliance for larger intranets starts at $30,000 and is reported to increase to as much as $600,000 for killer size intranets.

The Google Mini comes with one year of support, software updates, and hardware replacement coverage. It can be purchased online, directly from the Google Store with a credit card, check or purchase order. For more information, see http://mini.google.com.

Google Mini is a definite must for any organization looking at replacing their existing search capability, but don't forget the emphasis on rules and process...

It’s long been touted that the corporate portal is the true future of the intranet. From Microsoft’s perspective, the future is Sharepoint.

For those that missed the news (which is really no longer news anymore since the first word last year), MS is merging MS Content Management Server (CMS) and SharePoint into a single group. While the products may likely be kept separate (though MS has made no announcement on this yet), it will be seamlessly integrated form the user perspective – with a single user interface (see More on Microsoft’s plans).  

This is no average product announcement or program for MS. MS is reputedly spending US$300 million on this project with a full-time team of nearly one thousand people. Big plans for the future of the corporate intranet.

Arpan Shah is an MS honcho who blogs about the future of Microsoft SharePoint & CMS. In a recent blog entry (see Microsoft CMS Futures) Shah highlights the future plans for the merging of these two products into a single group or as he puts it, an “integrated set of technologies built on top of WSS (Windows SharePoint Services)” “We're careful not to say SPS "12" or CMS 2007, because packaging and licensing decisions have not been made,” says Shah. “While these technologies will be technically integrated (same development, deployment and end-user experience), we have not made decisions on how these will be packaged.”

The real bonus to users is new functionality… details (abridged) from Shah:

Content Contributor(gets better)
In Office "12", there are two primary ways for someone to author content just like in CMS 2002: via the web browser and by using a rich client, like Word. From a web browser perspective, the edit control is richer than the out-of-the-box control in CMS 2002. It has features like spell-checking, table formatting, styling and the ability for content contributors to author and use "reusable" HTML fragments - a commonly requested feature. Is it better than the Telerik control? I'm not sure how the Telerik control will progress in the Office "12" timeframe.

Rich Client Authoring - this is a much more flexible feature in the Office "12" timeframe. Out of the box, we will convert a variety of file formats to HTML (docx, wordml, xml) and provide the flexibility for customers and partners to develop their own converters. So, for example, if someone develops a PDF converter, they can enable content contributors to convert a PDF to an HTML page… Imagine a scenario where you collaborate on a case study and then want to publish it - you can now do that all very seamlessly. Another added benefit is that the system tracks where it's been published from and if it's changed from the source. So, for example, if you go to a page that has been authored using Word, for example, it will tell you that it's been published from word and will allow you to republish from the original doc OR change the page directly. Now every time you go back to the web page, it will tell you it's different from the word doc.

Template Designer(new role)
In CMS 2002, developers develop templates using Visual Studio. In Office "12", we've effectively introduced a new role allowing non-developers to create "templates" (known as Page Layouts in Office "12") using FrontPage "12". Template designers can add controls, web parts and placeholder controls (known as field controls).

Developer (more focused)
Developers develop the custom field controls (think custom placeholder controls), controls (server or user controls) and web parts. They don't have to worry about design anymore.

IT Pro (gets better)
We've added several great features making it easier for the IT Pro. For starters, there are no client installs needed for any of the roles. The edit control is a DHTML control unlike CMS 2002 which is an active-x control. Also, site manager functionality is now web-based. So if you want to add a new administrator, they don't have to install site manager.

We've also done a lot of work with deployment. Through a web-based UI, IT Pros can schedule deployments. You can schedule deployments, publish to multiple web server farms if you wanted to and you can provide your content contributors to effectively "instantly deploy" certain pages. For example, if there's a specific article that needs to get published "now", you can set that up. It's an out of the box feature.

Workflow (gets much better)
In CMS 2002, we have 1-2 step approval that is implicit based on channel security settings. There are several samples available on http://www.gotdotnet.com and several great partners that provide integrated workflow functionality. In fact, Skelta provides free workflow "lite".

In Office "12", workflow is extensible. Parameterized workflow templates are available out of the box. So if you want to create a mult-step serial or parallel workflow, you can just use one of the out-of-the-box workflow templates. Additionally, you can create your own workflow with FrontPage "12". This workflow functionality is built on top of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) for which WSS "v3" is the host.

Integrated Search
Office "12" Enterprise Search will be integrated with CMS functionality in Office "12". We're making a lot of investments in search and this will be available out of the box.

Multi-lingual Publishing
One of the customer asks from our global customers was out-of-the-box multilingual support. CMS 2002 supports unicode and is very extensible. Customers created localized versions of the web author console. In Office "12", we provide more out of the box multi-lingual publishing capabilities.

Besides support unicode and being built on the WSS multi-lingual infrastructure (different sites in different languages), we're going to have a feature that allows you to have multiple sites in different languages. For example, if you have a section of your site called Press Releases and you want to have Press Releases in different languages (Spanish and French), you can define a source and multiple targets. By defining a source and multiple targets, the system will keep the pages in sync between the source and the different targets. This works one way (source -> target) and respects workflow on the different targets. So for example, if I add a new press release in the English section (source), after it's approved, it will create the same pages in the Spanish and French sections.

Integrated Office "12" SharePoint ServersI briefly mentioned that we are investing in ECM, Portal, Collab, Search, BI and Forms features in Office "12" SharePoint Servers. Again, these investments will be -technically- integrated providing the same development, deployment and end-user experiences. So from a technology standpoint, the next version of CMS functionality will be integrated with a whole set of other technologies allowing you to deploy an end-to-end solution. For example, ECM consists of Document Management and Records Management functionality as well.

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Successful employee yellow pages