Comments on: Should you host your intranet and corporate website on one platform?

By: seth

seth — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:22:47 +0000

Hi Gordon, you are right. Drupal is not the best tool for managing different areas of a website. You might look into other platforms that have a more hierarchical site structure. On the PHP stack, I know you can do this with eZ Publish. I am pretty sure you can do this with Silverstripe as well. Shoot me an email if you want to discuss.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:35:13 +0000

Seth, thanks for your informative reply. Our situation is actually a little more complicated: We have our own website & intranet. On top of this, we want to offer our clients their websites and intranets, all under our ‘umbrella’.

I’ve set up a basic experimental multisite Drupal installation here, but rather than the second site being our own intranet, it is the website of our client. I was hoping to be able to set up many of these for many clients. Then, I was hoping to be able to make each site (ours & our clients’) all ‘dual-purpose’, each hosting both website and intranet. As you put it – ‘to manage “areas” of a site for different audiences’. But this now looks to be impossible… Am I correct?

Thanks in advance!
Gordon.

By: seth

seth — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:59:55 +0000

I would recommend using a "Multi-Site" setup where you run multiple sites on the same core but each site has its own database and configurations. Modules and themes can be shared across sites but can be activated/selected at the site level. Content, however, is not shared across sites. You can rig Drupal to push feeds from one site to another. The reason to go with two sites is that Drupal's access control is unwieldy to manage "areas" of a site for different audiences. The content hierarchy is totally flat. The multiple site configuration will also allow the different sites to independently adapt to the diverging requirements of your intranet and website through the configuration of modules.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:47:03 +0000

Very interesting discussion!

I’m weighing up the possibilities of using Drupal to create a system where a company can run its Intranet and website from the same installation. If anyone has advice – or can post useful links – then I’d love to hear!

Regards
G.

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:41:00 +0000

I think you should have the same platform but different environments. It is very expensive maintain knowledge of two different platforms, in case you want to do customization or addons.

By: Randy Woods

Randy Woods — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:15:56 +0000

Really helpful post. In our view, the underlying use cases – not to mention the business objectives – of public facing websites and intranets to differ so dramatically that it’s hard to imagine a solution that could manage both without huge customization efforts. In many cases, in fact, you see multiple platforms or systems within the intranet itself to deal with top down info dissemination (the paid leave form, the H1N1 policy) and bottom-up social computing (wiki, blogs, content rankings etc.) In this case, intranet/enterprise search becomes critical and must span both. Make sense?

By: Dominic Cronin

Dominic Cronin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:54:05 +0000

I recognise each of the points you are making, and I agree with them; however, I’d like to note that it’s quite possible for a single WCM system to have a range of features that allow the implementor to make radically different choices when building an intranet or an Internet site.

It’s not always wise to use the same platform for both, and attempting to share content between the two is often a bad idea, but when an organisation has invested in a fully featured system, and trained its people accordingly, it can often make sense to have a common system.

(I work mostly with Tridion implementations.)