FOR THE HORDE! ... or some other Groupware package...

December 7, 2008 12:14 PM

I've taxed myself with saving the company money with clever use of smoke, mirrors, and computers! One of the things I'd like to replace is our proprietary intranet site that is costing us at least $5000 a year. I'd to go with something Open Source that we can manage ourselves. What do You think will meet our needs? And how can we use our Intranet better?

We currently use WebEx's WebOffice with about 35 members out of the few hundred that work for the company. I'd like a way to bring everyone into the company.

Here's what we currently actually use from WebOffice:

- Group Documents: All of our HR documents, memos, and product information are stored on our Intranet.
- Calendar: Though, frankly I've only seen birthdays on it.
- Databases: We have databases of Customer Contact information on the intranet, but I have never actually seen this information used for anything. We don't even pull stuff off of it for mailings.

I've looked at Horde Groupware, but am not sure if it'll meet our needs. Do you have any experience with open source Intranet/groupware software?

Also, how can we use our Intranet better? It's not used as much as it should be. How can we get users more involved?

posted by aristan to computers & internet (14 comments total)

What about a wiki on a secure/password-protected server?
posted by mynameisluka at 12:39 PM on December 7, 2008

Also, how can we use our Intranet better? It's not used as much as it should be. How can we get users more involved?

You should be asking your users this question, instead of us.

The Calendar sounds underutilized. Have you asked anyone why? Perhaps important features are missing, the interface is clunky, or often users simply need to be trained to learn what's available.

I write internet web software, and have one user who won't touch a new feature until I've come down and introduced her to it. The student workers explore and pick it up immediately, but the work culture she comes from says you need to be trained before using something new. So I go "train" her.

Same deal with the customer contact database. There's got to be some reason why people aren't using it; some reason why the old way is better. If you want to improve the process, your first task is finding out why.

You say that Horde Groupware might not meet our needs, but have you done the studies and focus groups to determine what those needs really are? Have you discussed with the users what they like and don't like about the current system? It sounds all like market speak, but employees really do need dialogue and feedback opportunities when you're designing and implementing the tools they'll use.

Sorry if I come off a little caustic. But working in IT administration, I constantly see software mandates come down from administrators who've never even had lunch with an end user, let alone stop and ask them what they really need to get their job done more effectively. And it almost always ends poorly.
posted by sbutler at 12:47 PM on December 7, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

sbutler, quite frankly you do come off as caustic.

Right now, I am trying to come up with some ideas of what to bring to the table. I am very early in planning anything, and I am not the official decision maker. I have to present options to the people who are decision makers, but aren't tech orientated.

Therefore, I'd like some ideas of what might be a better replacement for our current platform. Right now, I have looked at Horde because I'm slightly familiar with it, but I want to walk in with several options. I can't just test one platform, there's no point.

I included the list of parts of our current intranet that actually get used because it would seem obvious they would need to be included in the new intranet.

What I want are options, opinions, and experiences. Right now all you've just told me "You're doing it wrong!". I'm not asking if/how/when I should use focus group testing, I'm asking what products I should put forward to be tested and why I should consider them.
posted by aristan at 1:00 PM on December 7, 2008

Horde does a lot and it's very easy to extend, but it's not very pretty and is sometimes buggy. It would be nice if more of the apps were like DIMP.

It works for my clients, but they're all rather small, and they mainly stick to the webmail.
posted by wierdo at 2:04 PM on December 7, 2008

Drupal has features that should accommodate the things you listed above. For calendars, you'd need one of the many plugins (called "modules" in Drupalspeak). It'll handle document storage out of the box, but if you want to search the contents of those documents, there are plugins that'll let you do that, too.

You can get some info about how people have used Drupal (and what considerations they've evaluated when comparing Drupal to other potential solutions) by Googling "Drupal intranet". (Note that the "Drupal Case Study for Corporate/Intranet" link that comes up #2 dates back to 2004, when Drupal was in its infancy. There's another case study (going back to 2005, so still quite old) about Yahoo using Drupal for a specific intranet task.

I might suggest setting up a Drupal intranet alongside your current intranet and gradually moving some content to the Drupal site, doing some user surveys and also some user training to see what users think.

Good luck!
posted by kristi at 2:08 PM on December 7, 2008

Another solution might be a document management system like agorum core or alfresco. Their approach is similar but slightly different from content management systems like drupal. Agorum looks butt ugly, but gives you email, calendar and a searchable document management system with versioning. Agorum and alfresco can easily provide this functionality via a network drive, so that using it is just like copying some files in windows. This way you can have documents in your intranet without much difficulty for the users.
Those two also have the advantage/disadvantage that they have companies behind them that can sell you additional components/services.

Depending on the size and geographical distribution of your company, a wiki could be very nice. I like dokuwiki, because you do not have to necessarily use a database. A drawback could be that a wiki can become a mess quickly if there are no posting guidelines. A good thing about wikis is that they can be used to quickly create information about standard operating procedures and such, drawing upon a larger pool of people for knowledge than you would by just assigning a task to a single person/team.

I also want to pipe up in the defense of sbutler, since most of what you gave us prior to your clarification , was: "We have this, but we don't really use it."
I immediately have to think about why you don't use it. Is it to hard to use, or doesn't it meet your requirements?
That's why I peddle the very general suggestions of document management systems and wikis, including links to concrete products that work for me/that I know of.

Good suggestions can only be made, if you give some information about your needs. How big is the company? How much is it geographically distributed? How big is employee fluctuation? Etc., etc. If you cannot give this kind of information because of confidentiality concerns, you have to have the ideas yourself and mefi can then help you to find the best open source product for this. (And know I have to hope, that I do not come across as too caustic ;-)
posted by mmkhd at 3:23 PM on December 7, 2008

And know I have to pipe up with a contribution to the last part of your post:

Also, how can we use our Intranet better? It's not used as much as it should be. How can we get users more involved?

I think that the secret is to make it simple and immediately useful. Like my DMS suggestion from above that lets you search your intranet documents (useful) and presents the interface as a network drive (easy).

Here dokuwiki might be not so good. It is useful (sharing knowledge/ideas) but it might not be as easy to use as you would like to achieve widespread use, since it lacks a wysiwyg editor (I didn't look for one, since we only use it for a group of technical people).
posted by mmkhd at 3:30 PM on December 7, 2008

If you so happen to be using Windows 2003 server you can use Share Point Services for free and there are 40 templates out there that cover most of your needs.
posted by bleucube at 3:33 PM on December 7, 2008

FWIW, I would approach this as an opportunity to make your intranet better but not cheaper- $5,000 / year is pretty small money for an intranet, when you add in equipment, maintenance, support, and endless password reset requests. For a group of 35 folks, that works out to $11/seat / month. In other words, I suspect that the budget argument is unlikely to sway anyone- but the features / functionality discussion might.

In my experience, many intranets are small because of political turf issues between departments (the NY engineers hate those crackhead hippies in SF, Toronto doesn't understand why the company won't switch from CVS to Mercurial already, and the sales team is canibalistic everywhere...). Be aware that you will be traversing difficult political turf, as rolling out your intranet will be seen as a threat to existing workflow, practices, and organizational visibility.

I'd try to get a sense from your IT team as to what they would be willing to live with in terms of platform. If they are a pure MS shop, I'd look to see if you have sharepoint site licensing already available, or I'd look at dotNetNuke. If a java shop, I'd investigate LifeRay Portal and Redhat's JBoss Portal. In my experience, you'll need to work with the young turks to bring a PHP-style solution like Drupal into your organization; it really depends on the religious beliefs of your IT folks.

Good Luck! It can be a wonderful thing if you can pull it off.
posted by jenkinsEar at 4:45 PM on December 7, 2008

sbutler's answer, caustic or not, is right on the money. The first step is not to start playing with different software packages, it's to find out what your needs actually are -- we can sit here all day naming product options, but we may as well be using a dartboard if we (and you) don't even know what you need the thing to do for your company.

If you've listed the three parts of your intranet that "actually get used," and two of them aren't actually used for anything, then my first suggestion would be to save your company $5000 a year by shutting down the intranet entirely and replacing it with a simple fileserver for HR docs.
posted by ook at 5:14 PM on December 7, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I'll reinforce what others have said.

1) $5K isn't very much. You could turn the thermostat down/up 2 degrees and save that annually in an office that size. I'd be surprised if you could change your intranet for less without sacrificing something important. So don't make your case on price. (Someone is going to have to maintain it no matter what. Someone will spend at least $5K worth of time supporting even the smoothest intranet.

2) "Doing it yourself" still costs money because it takes someone's time.

3) More features = more time. More time = more money.

4) Change = training. Training = more money. (or alternately: No Training = No one uses the intranet = waste of money.)

5) If you don't use a feature think hard and long if you really need it. I would say that your calendar application falls into that category. Maybe all you need is Basecamp or Google Docs/Calendar or even

Sorry I don't have more specific recommendations for you, but I don't have a good sense for what you're trying to accomplish with the revamp. You share documents, but do you need to have revision control? Or concurrent editing? What format are those docs (Word? Photoshop? STL?) Who should have access to the database and doesn't? What advantage would that access give people and in what ways do those people need to access it?

If I had to punt, I'd say "Drupal".
posted by Ookseer at 6:49 PM on December 7, 2008

Open source software is wonderful in the sense that with some programming expertise, you can bend it precisely to your will. However, Windows SharePoint Services is free with Windows Server 2003 and up and does everything you mentioned and more. Its integration with Microsoft Office is top-notch, as is its Active Directory integration. It works reasonably well with non-IE browsers. Customization (with the included components) is easy and requires no programming.

One caveat - if you choose WSS, run it on Microsoft SQL Server. I've seen problems in the past where a Windows Update caused problems restoring WSS database backups that were made before the update was installed.

I know Microsoft is bad, etc., etc. but the advantages of WSS are:
* Quick and easy deployment
* Programming not required for customization
* Easy to use for the non-technical
* AD usernames and passwords are used for logins.
* Integrates with Office 2007.
posted by cnc at 8:33 PM on December 7, 2008

(bias)I work for MS and support SharePoint - so, I can easily agree with what several other people have mentioned - it is free and WSS will suit many needs. I see many, many, many companies picking it up because it saves them money.(/bias)

I will also agree that a $5,000 budget is fairly small and trying to reduce it further may mean that while you spend less on software, the cost of customizing or enhancing it via consulting or time spent by staff will quickly outweigh whatever you think you are saving initially.

See - while I do think that others are correct in that you may want to do some focus groups, gather requirements, etc - it would still be a good idea to basically provide a "toolset" that allows users to customize their portions of the intranet to server their needs. SharePoint is like that - you support the database/storage, the security, the root landing page/site and then let them have other sites to customize and play with.

(And, if you still want my opinion on an open-source CMS/intranet, I really really really like Plone... Basically if you are looking at any CMS/intranet type system, look at the number of add-ons/components which you can install to build a nice toolset)
posted by jkaczor at 9:18 AM on December 8, 2008

Nthing that it's your company and you should be doing research to find out what your company wants, or why your company doesn't want what it's got.

Here's another thing: what's your ongoing maintenance plan? There's nothing worse or more offputting than a website which starts out well, then falters and grinds to a halt.

I saw someone's intranet once which showed their whole operation to the granularity of maps showing where individual people sat. Jim's desk it on level three, north end corner near the fire doors. If he's not answering his phone, Mary is the nearest person, call her on extension 1234 and maybe she knows where he is.

That's a brilliant level of detail, but it only works if you're constantly updating it.

If you've got five grand to build something clever, and no money at all to make sure it stays updated, relevant and current, then you've got a problem.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 3:02 PM on December 8, 2008