[thelist] Recommendations for Intranet Applications

Burhan Khalid thelist at meidomus.com
Wed Jul 14 03:57:34 CDT 2004


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).

> (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.

> 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

I thank you all for your time.


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