Setting up an intranet

what could it be used for and what should it cost

[HelenDev]

I am the web developer for a medium sized company and have volunteered to set up an intranet. I now need to write a detailed plan to present to the Chairman. Help!

The ideas I have so far are:
a staff forum
area for sharing files such as forms
database for client info

Can anyone think of any other things we might use it for? I realise I should probably be asking this question of my colleagues, but they are not very tech savvy and are scared they might have to change the way they do things. Not very helpful.

Also the cost we have been quoted is £5000 to set up a server for this plus £1000 a year - I have to justify spending this amount, but I don't know if I can. It seems very pricey to me, seeing as we already have company servers and things set up with this IT company. (I must confess I don't know much about hardware). Does anyone know whether this price is reasonable?

I intend to use php and mysql to make all this happen if we go ahead.

Any thoughts anyone?

[vwbeetle]

Hi there,

there are many good reasons to have an intranet - they are useful as a good internal communications tool for staff memos
marketing update
performance reporting
HR communication
Facilities

If you would like to discuss further PM me.

Cheers

VWB

[wackal]

how about a company wide knowledgebase?

you can put all kinds of info in there, such as procedures, company info, employee info, etc. Depending on how fancy you want to get, IM could be installed on all PC's and employees could IM each other.

The price you qouted sounds a little high. If you already have the servers, then all you need is a router, ethernet cable, and ethernet cards in each PC. You'll also need someone to configure the server. That is where it can get expensive.

[HelenDev]

Thanks for all your suggestions. I have now made a draft of the plan.

I think the cost is due to the fact that we don't have the necessary servers in place - the only ones we do have don't have enough room and bandwidth in the first place. So I will suggest that the cost would probably only be justified if we move our website on to the new server, currently we use an outside host.

[bellrj]

As an IT person I think Intranets are great because they enable companies to share knowledge that wouldn't necessarily be shared otherwise. However, as the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. The major problem I have encountered over the last 5 years of developing intranet sites is getting people to use it and use it properly. Luckily, here we have management support so that's a good start, but it is still very difficult to encourage people to get into the habit of using an intranet. There are ways and means, of course, but in your presentation I would also cover how you intend to promote, encourage, and - if need be - force usage of your new system.

Some other stuff that we put on ours are details of social events, clubs, a Fantasy Formula One competition, and job vacancies. Good luck! :)

[charlier]

Just out of curiosity would you be interested in a solution that provided you with a hard drive loaded with all the software you need installed. FreeBSD OS, mysql, apache, php, samba, proftpd etc etc.

You would just need to install it in a plain vanilla intel box and boot up. Configure it for your server name and IP number and off you go.

[HelenDev]

charlier I did talk to our IT people about just setting up an old pc as an internet server, but they said that seeing as we have bandwidth problems already (we do - our main server that most of my colleagues use runs so slow that they have trouble even writing an email) that it wouldn't be feasible.

When I came up with this intranet idea I was just thinking all we would need to do is get another pc, and hook it up - that's why I baulked at the £5000 figure!

[trillianjedi]

The most valuable resource we have on ours is actually a kind of links directory but with user input for queries. There are a lot of internet resources we use that take these.

As an example, we regularly look at UK legislation online at the HMSO webiste, so on the intranet homepage we have an edit box which we type in the name of the statute we want and a button which we click on and that sends the CGI string off to the HMSO website. Page then gets returned with the HMSO search results.

On the same page we have similar for HM Land Registry etc etc.

It's nice because it pools everything into one place.

TJ