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A joyous side effect of being not only a techwriter but also the only native
English speaker here is that I've been volunteered (OK, I also am very
interested in this) to set up an intranet site for my small (about 50
employees) company. We want a good forum for listserv type exchange of
information (threads, archives, specialized subcategories), company employee
information (contact information & newsy type stuff), common calendar, & a
place to post documents for company review. Ideally we want minimal set-up
time, little to no programming experience required to manage it, and very
low-key maintenance.
What I'm interested in knowing is if any of you have experience with this
and can give me some recommendations for tools and any caveats (beyond the
one coworker who told me to stay far away from the project because once I
start I'll never have time for anything else).
After checking all the sources and search engines (including our archives)
I've discovered that the types of intranet tools available can be broken
down into 4 basic categories:
1) "In-a-box" applications/software that you install on your own server and
get up and running "instantly."
2) Attachments (software components) that you add-on to existing databases.
3) Hosted intranet sites that you subscribe to.
4) Hardware/software applications that are servers and intranet applications
in one.
After checking out many products, we are basically leaning towards the
intranet in-a-box applications (although we wouldn't mind a nice add-on
component to our Sybase database), with big interest in a product called
PlanetIntra.
Any thoughts, ideas, directions, red flags, etc. will be much appreciated.
