Intranet

alowe

Help please .... I'm just back from maternity leave, and my brain has really gone to mush!

I've been asked to research into doing an intranet for our organisation. We've about 100 users, most situated on campus, but a few on off-site locations (although I can handle these not been able to access the intranet.)

We currently have installed MS exchange 2003 and SBS 2003. We do have an upgrade to 2008 available to us, but because a lot of our PC's are still operating on Windows xp, not sure if we're going to upgrade yet.

I saw sharepoint a while ago, showcased by MS themselves, and thought it looked mighty impressive, and would probably do everything I needed (and more). However, not sure of cost, and was then thinking, sure can't I just create a website and put it on our server with IIS?

So question - is sharepoint a better option for an intranet? Am I been nieve in thinking that a basic intranet could be created easily enough using IIS and website design?

Thanks, and sorry for my stupidity!

homer911

It depends on how you want to use the intranet

If you are happy for the entire content to be managed centrally, then IIS is fine, but if you want the intranet to be a collaborative forum, you would be much better with SharePoint

You should brainstorm all the required and potential uses of the intranet and then decide on the platform

Capt'n Midnight

first thing is to find out what is essential
then get the wish list that people would like but more importantly could live without

then start looking
you may need to do another pass on the requirements and remind people that if they don't ask for a feature they won't get it

bhickey

Like what they said. Find out, then document and then get agreement from everyone on what you're trying to do. THEN and only then should you think about what tools you might use to deliver whatever it is that you've all actually agreed on.

The term 'Intranet' is massively vague. An Intranet is simply a private Internet so it could be used for all sorts of weird and wonderful things.

alowe

Thanks - just needed to confirm I wasn't been stupid thinking that a very basic intranet could be done with iis, but if they wanted decent functionality, then we look down a different software route.

thanks again. Will get exactly what they want it to do at meeting.

woolymammoth

alowe wrote: »

I've been asked to research into doing an intranet for our organisation. We've about 100 users, most situated on campus, but a few on off-site locations (although I can handle these not been able to access the intranet.)

We currently have installed MS exchange 2003 and SBS 2003. We do have an upgrade to 2008 available to us, but because a lot of our PC's are still operating on Windows xp, not sure if we're going to upgrade yet.

I saw sharepoint a while ago, showcased by MS themselves, and thought it looked mighty impressive, and would probably do everything I needed (and more). However, not sure of cost, and was then thinking, sure can't I just create a website and put it on our server with IIS?

So question - is sharepoint a better option for an intranet? Am I been nieve in thinking that a basic intranet could be created easily enough using IIS and website design?

people will begin to think i work for microsoft with the amount of times i've said this (i wish i did) but anyway, Office 365. It's not available until early next year. It's current form is available as BPOS, or business productivity online services..

It's quite literally an Exchange, Sharepoint, and Communicator package, hosted online, by microsoft, in their data centre in west dublin. For the record, i really don't like sharepoint myself. but I seen the preview of hosted sharepoint 2010 at a microsoft seminar a couple of weeks back, and i have to say it's fairly impressive. The great point of things like this for business is that you need feck all hardware yourselves. You don't have to worry about planning as much, getting licenses, buying new hardware, having it all built & configured, or backing it up. It also removes any hurdles you might have had otherwise about your remote users.

there's a fact sheet on it here. You might find it difficult to justify the cost, so all i can say is compare the yearly cost to what it would cost for new hardware, warranties, licenses, people, time, backups, etc.

Capt'n Midnight

woolymammoth wrote: »

The great point of things like this for business is that you need feck all hardware yourselves. You don't have to worry about planning as much, getting licenses, buying new hardware, having it all built & configured, or backing it up. It also removes any hurdles you might have had otherwise about your remote users.

there's a fact sheet on it here. You might find it difficult to justify the cost, so all i can say is compare the yearly cost to what it would cost for new hardware, warranties, licenses, people, time, backups, etc.

how does it compare to using google docs ?

re backups, many years ago I got a letter from microsoft saying our volume license was due to expire and that we'd need to upgrade soon. when I contacted them they could not tell me what product it applied to. Something about loosing the original data. Never depend on someone to do your backups. You must have backups, you must have backups that are restorable no matter what happens to the service provider.

As for licenses they are a major ongoing cost for a microsoft shop, and you can't say for certain what the costs will be in future because the conditions change a lot. There is a lot of history with microsoft offering cheap licenses and then ramping up the costs, but to be fair there is a lot of stuff that has become free or had a lot of value added too.


again all moot unless you know your present requirements and have rough costs for add ons, 'we can do this for X with product A but if you want that additional functionality it will cost us Y extra , so it might be cheaper to go for the more expensive product B'