Building your Corporate Intranet - Expression Engine

Your corporate Intranet - in this case your internal (corporate) website - can form a central role within your firms’ work. Information sharing, business process management, document management and employee collaboration are all functions that can be integrated into your intranet application. In theory, your intranet can be the gateway/portal to every process in your company: it can be the first and foremost application your employees will use. Your intranet can however soon get very complex - and that usually also means: very costly. Take for example Microsoft SharePoint - an enterprise portal application. SharePoint offers a lot of functionality but it can easily become too complex and costly. For intranet budgets below 50.000 (dollars or euros) I would never recommend it.

With a smaller budget, you can however still get pretty far. Depending on your wishes, you could have a corporate intranet up and running for around 3.000-10.000 (dollars or euros). What would an intranet like that possibly have to offer? A content management system backed system with: corporate news, employee directory, corporate information pages, corporate wiki (where your employees can contribute content) and picture galleries (for those company event pictures). Or in other words: a modern web-publishing system for your firm’s internal website.

Expression Engine, a powerful content management system developed by Ellislab, would be a possible candidate for a “low-cost yet powerful” intranet. Out of the box it offers: content management, blogs (news), wiki’s, member management and picture galleries (and more). It is built on open source standards (PHP and MySQL) and runs on any standard web server. It is used on thousands of website around the world and can just as well power your internal (intranet) website. The power of Expression Engine lies in its flexibility: it is easily adapted to your needs. Most importantly: it keep things simple - you do not for example need a whole army of “application consultants” to help you set it up. Someone with web development/web designing skills will suffice.

Over the next months I will be discussing the possibilities of using Expression Engine as a intranet system in several posts to this weblog.