After a del.ic.ious morning tea of cream scones, Simon Ovens, previously the Intranet Support Officer at the IHC NZ Inc. presented on a session entitled Case Study: Open Source Intranets on a Shoestring (not his, however, he wasn’t wearing sandals). He was talking about the IHC did during his tour of duty. Simon is now a .NET developer at Intergen in New Zealand. Simon’s been working in the IT industry for 5 years. He joined IHC in 2006 to help them with their Intranet, and 3 weeks ago joined Intergen.

Let’s Get Into It …
IHC has a national office in Wellington, but has 150 branches throughout New Zealand, supporting over 2000 staff. The inhouse IT team is 5, and there are three data centers.

The IHC had an intranet, but in moving forward, had to decide between three routes:
(1) develop an inhouse application
– Advantages: don’t need time to learn the framework, total control over the system, and ownership of the source
– Disadvantages: there’s no existing framework to work with, longer timeline (usually), scalability issues, and ongoing support requirements.

(2) use an open source solutions
– Advantages: it’s a tested system or framework, there’s a lot of third party modules available (good extensibility at low cost), online support, large developer community to support, cost lower than vendor supplied
– Disadvantages: support can be slow to respond, it doesn’t include some of the features that vendor supplied offers, and internal staff may not be familiar with the technology used.

(3) go for vendor supplied
– Advantages: it’s a well tested system or framework, professional support is usually available, and it may have more core features
– Disadvantages: generally higher cost

Some of the business drivers and factors:
– It needed to align to the business size
– Budget was an issue
– Functionality was important
– … looked at OpenSourceCMS and The CMS Matrix as helpful resources

The decision: DotNetNuke won …
– Cost
– Inhouse developer with CRM experience was available
– Runs on Microsoft .NET environment
– Follows Microsoft’s coding best practice
– Maturity in the product
– Active Directory integration
– Modular based system … good for extendability
– Easy to develop and build new modules, eg, developers can build new things
– There’s a very active community around DotNetNuke … roadmap plans, in-person conferences, forums
– There’s a large community of organizations using it
– It was the platform being used by Gen-i for the IHC public Internet site
– Featured a good interface for users to manage the site
– Good documentation available … online websites, online forums, books (even DotNetNuke for Dummies), developers, etc.

Functionality
Out-of-the-box functionality is extensive … Simon called out Active Directory Integration, Forums (initially thought it would be for informal / casual things, eg, parties, but found that some groups wanted forums for business purposes … very good tool to bring distributed teams together), and third-party modules (for automatically generating real-time charts things from internal systems on the Intranet to report on things).

Lessons Learnt
On the bad side:
– It could take some time to get an answer on the forums. It was unpredictable, and there was no one to get mad at.
– It can be a learning curve to understand the system … both .NET and DotNetNuke. Probably need 1-2 years previously exposure to .NET to get straight into it.

On the good side:
– The system is very stable and mature.
– It is completely free.
– Great speed and responsiveness.

And now for the demo …
Simon showed the site. He also showed how easily it was to edit the Intranet and add new content.
– You can say where you want the page to go through a drop-down list of current pages.
– There’s integration with Active Directory for showing groups. You can give them view/edit rights as required.
– Modules can be targeted for specific areas of the screen.

Questions
1. (Richard) How long have you spend on user training?
(Simon) Spent a couple of hours with one Intranet editor. Can also provide the DotNetNuke for Dummies book as and where required.
(Simon) Biggest training issue was uploading pictures.
(Simon) Biggest concern was about changing size, color and fonts. It is possible to lock this down too, so only text is displayed.

2. (Ken) Support for other browsers?
(Simon) Yes, works with lots, eg, Firefox. The core team spends a lot of time working on browser compatibility.

3. (Ian) As a charity, IHC could get MOSS 2007 for about $1,000. Why did you choose that?
(Simon) I don’t think we got it offered as low as $1000! We were also put off due to the previous edition.
(Simon) Given that the public Internet was in DotNetNuke as well, it was helpful to run modules on both sites.