pTools Software today announced the completion of one of the largest public sector IT projects undertaken in Ireland to date. The HSE intranet, which is built on pTools Content Management Software (CMS), provides information and services for all of its 100,000 strong workforce, and will be regularly accessed by over 50,000 HSE staff from a network of more than 25,000 computers. Key features of the intranet include access to daily staff news, briefings and reports, staff email and contact directories, medical libraries and other resources. pTools was awarded the contract following a competitive tender process and worked with HSE ICT Services and the Communications divisions over an eighteen month period to deliver the new intranet. Known as HSEnet, it provides a single unified location for internal online content for all HSE staff and, since going live in November 2007, is already receiving more than 750 thousand page impressions per month and is expected to exceed 1 million page impressions in the coming months.

"Here’s a fact: intranets don’t have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw together with Front Page that no one looks at."

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Jeff WhatCott, Acquia, asked some important and thought provoking questions on his blog, "A Dormant Drupal Opportunity". While the post focuses on Drupal, I think the contents of his post can apply to almost any content management system (CMS) out there.

In the article, Jeff asks whether defining Drupal as a CMS does more harm than good in describing the scope of features Drupal has to offer. In his words, the term CMS is a "20th century term that completely undersells what Drupal is capable of" as social software and a means for collaboration. Considering I really didn't understand what a CMS was until the 21st century, I beg to differ that the term CMS is as ancient as he makes it sound. However, he is entirely correct...many of today's Web applications that we call a CMS, really are not just a CMS.

Jeff asks three questions in his post:

1. Do you think we should put the CMS term to bed?
2. Would it be possible to grab some of that team collaboration social software market opportunity for the Drupal community?
3. Why isn’t there already a billion dollar Drupal services ecosystem for team collaboration? What’s missing?

While I appreciate comments here, please be sure to go over to Jeff's post and respond there too. In fact, if you only want to comment at one site...go there so we don't steal any of Jeff's "thunder". I've already made my comments at his site and I've attached my response to the above questions below.

The Nielsen Norman Group say the top trends in the best intranets flip the priority from "information" to "people." Doing so can keep maintenance manageable, costs down, and information current.

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Yes, another challenge for those of us that work in the IT department! Just what we wanted, right? We're spending all this time reworking the corporate Intranet so everyone can collaborate better. What happens when we're done and no one shows up?

It could be tempting to conclude that because your employees enjoy keeping a personal blog or spending time with contacts on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, that they would want to participate in an internal corporate version of those sites. But don't be so sure.

A new study has found that the phenomenon of social networking and collaboration does not yet have a natural extension behind the enterprise firewall.

Can't we just get a break?

Seriously though, I'm curious how your office Intranet is doing? Have you recently added collaboration and social networking tools to your server? If so, how well is the improved server working for you? What recommendations do you have for others to follow? Inquiring minds want to know!

Analysis and Recommendations for Information Technology User Support Provided to a Government Field Office

Information technology users in government field offices require a user support program that addresses their needs for successful completion of job duties. Providing the necessary user support is a challenge for office management and the information technology staff. While this professional report focuses on information technology user support provided to a government office, many of the observations and lessons should apply to other organizations.

An assessment is made on the intended goals of the user support program for providing information system maintenance and documentation to the user of a selected government field office. A comparison is then made between the physical processes involved within the "ideal" information systems for user support with current information systems utilized by the organization. Based on the evaluation of the performance of the current information systems, recommendations for improving the information technology user support program at the government field office are presented.

This short primer may help you through the perils and pleasures of collaboration on intra-company wikis.

You probably know it's rude to send an e-mail message in all caps. But did you know that you can step on others' toes by deleting content in a wiki? That's like using the dessert fork for the main course: It's simply bad manners. When working with a wiki—as with any new technology—it's easy to unknowingly make a faux pas. Read more.

Drupal has a fantastic feature, the hook_auth to allow any third party to interact in the authentication process. This is used to authenticate against other Drupal sites over XMLRPC, it is used in the experimental openID integration, to allow authentication against any database, and so on. And off course to authenticate against an LDAP directory, using the ldapauth module. This HOWTO helps you [get] on the track for the LDAP coupling. We use ldapauth.module, userprotect.module and Sympal Password Hijack to mould our Drupal site into an authenticate-only site.  Complete Story