Creating a company intranet with a CMS
One of the more difficult things to do in a company is to keep track of all the ideas that bubble up during the day. In meetings, conversations by the water cooler, talks at lunch, and around the office, employees are coming up with great ideas constantly. Most of them are lost though and end up being a successful hit product at a competitor’s company a few years later. The solution is to develop a company intranet that can capture all of the ideas for later use. The intranet can also serve as a way to deliver company news, keep track of company policies and a way to maintain records of how to do different processes in the company.
The rest of this article discusses the Drupal Content Management System and how we’ve used it to create a company intranet inside of our own business.
Setting up the CMS. The first step in the process is to install the content management system. We chose to install the system in a subdomain (ie, intranet.mysite.com) so that it was easy to remember where the site was installed. Setting up a subdomain and installing the CMS are beyond the scope of this article, but the process isn’t very complicated and there are a number of tutorials for both managing subdomains and installing a CMS available on Google.The second significant piece of managing a CMS as an intranet is to ensure that only authenticated users (users who have signed in) are able to access any of the information. A corporate intranet is usually very confidential, so the front page of the intranet should only be a login. Access to any other pages should be denied until after login.
Setting up the first book. We chose to use a book structure in Drupal for the first bits of information that we included in our corporate intranet. By setting up a book that had the basic pages of our departments (sales, development, accounting, etc) we were able to create a hierarchy that made sense to anyone using the book. The book is where we store all of the procedures we do on a regular basis like running a marketing campaign or installing a particular type of software. All of the steps are documented so that a new hire can quickly learn how to do different things and constantly has something to reference when lost. It cuts down on the teaching and learning time and gets new hires up to speed quickly. It also serves as a way for the company to monitor which processes are working well and which need to be tweaked. It has also served as a great place to keep track of passwords and logins to websites that are necessary for a lot of our employees to access on a regular basis.
Setting up a discussion forum. The next thing we created as part of our corporate intranet was a discussion forum. Our company has people working in the field, in on-site locations hours away, and in our local office. We needed a way for them to communicate problems and discuss different policies, so we set up the discussion forum. The forum is generally used for persistent, long-term discussions of major projects as we’ve found the many of the day to day conversations happen in chat programs (ie, googletalk). One of the best uses of the forums has been to keep track of meeting minutes so we always have a record of what happened at each meeting. We often create a forum topic prior to a meeting so that everyone involved can bring up conversation points prior to the meeting, ensuring we talk about everything we need to discuss.
Creating and managing lists. One of the features we’ve added most recently is the ability to add and manage lists, especially lists of new products and marketing ideas. We often have more ideas then we do time to execute them, so by creating a list and constantly adding ideas, we’re able to keep track of ideas that are important to our company. Recently, we’ve looked back at our lists and have culled a number of great ideas that would have otherwise been lost. The lists are occasionally trimmed and reduced, but for the most part they’re just left to grow. It’s a brainstorming session without time limits.
Cody Boyte works at Click Consulting, a web development and IT consulting firm. If your company is would like more information about developing a CMS website or would like to have one developed, contact us at http://www.clickconsulting.com.
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