[thelist] Recommendations for Intranet Applications

chris h chris123 at magma.ca
Wed Jul 14 08:44:55 CDT 2004


On July 14, 2004 04:57 am, Burhan Khalid wrote:
> Ken Schaefer wrote:
> > What are you using for email, task scheduling etc at the moment? Or
> > you going to be building this functionality into the intranet?
>
> Well we have a webmail system, but its not really what I would like to
> integrate into the portal. I would like it ideally to be integrated as
> part of the portal system. Even if its a separate portal-only module. We
> use IMAP and POP3 servers (not Exchange).

OpenGroupware.org/cyrus-IMAP with AD or OpenLDAP works nicely complete with 
webmail for rermote access. Commerical plugin is available for Outlook and 
its a MAPI client not replication based. OpenGropware also comes with 
document management capabilities which we have setup in the past to share 
documents across a firewall (ie: for remote users) with controlled passage 
between WAN and LAN

> > (I suppose the question revolves around: do you already have systems
> > for these functions that you want to integrate into some kind of
> > intranet "portal", or do you need to build/implement this stuff from
> > scratch?)
>
> Right now we are using a mixed bag. One application from vendor x for
> support tickets, another application for webmail access, etc.  I would
> think that if all this functionality was built-in to a portal (either
> prebuilt or written as components inhouse), it would provide for tighter
> integration.

zope, combined with some "products" such as CMF and Plone, provides an 
outstanding Portal sytem for an Intranet. Easily connects to most existing 
application sets and RDMS and without the associated costs of customizing 
package CMS based commercial portal systems in terms of customization. 
>
> > Also, you mentioned a Windows client network: do you use MS Office for
> > your document creation or something else? Outlook for messaging?
>
> Yes, we have Office 2003 for all document tasks, and we use Outlook for
> office email.
 
Both OGo and Plone support these easily.

> In the end, the hope is to create a dasboard that the employee can login
> to from either office location (and also remote locations -- we have a
> few sales guys that go around carrying laptops), and they are instantly
> upto date on all happenings in the company. They can see their email,
> their tasks, any support tickets assigned to them, etc.

Yup, easily done with the recommended application set. Works rather nicely 
 
> Now that I think about it, a good example of what I would like would be
> the Outlook "home" page. The one that shows you your pending tasks,
> calendar items, mail summary, etc.  Something like that, but web based,
> to which we can add other components (like billing, accounts, hr,
> tickets, news, content from our partners, etc.)

Yup, Standard company information portal with selective and controlled access 
for remote locations. 

> The main issue here is that right now, if an employee wants to check the
> support system, they have to login to tickets.* (or open up the desktop
> client for the system). If they want to check their email, they have to
> open up Outlook (or login to webmail.*) ... if they want to check on
> client accounts, they have to login to billing.* ... and we don't have a
> hr/salary system. We want to pull all these things together into one
> application/platform. So in the end, the employee logs into staff.* and
> they have access to everything.

Standard concept which we did in the past with the following products 
integrated: OpenOffice.org, OpenLDaP, OpenGroupware.org, commerical pluggin 
for Outlook, Zope, Plone, connectors to our RDMS based applications, 
cyrus-IMAP, Apache, SAMBA, python, some perl modules, SpamAssassin, AmavisD, 
and MSOffice all except for MSOffice running on SuSE linux. Can be done   

> The reason we are looking into this now, is because we are planning a
> re-write of our billing system, so this is an ideal time to integrate
> other components and get it done correctly.

Exactly, and regardless of what RDMS you use for that, zope will have a 
connector for it. So zope then becomes that glue factory that ties it all 
together for the Portal

> I thank you all for your time.

Would be interested in hearing what you come up with in the end.

/ch



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