Working on a new Intranet - Sharepoint vs. Drupal
Mon, 08/30/2010 - 3:20pm
I'm working on a new Intranet for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, and I've been developing in Drupal for the time being (the end-user experience, in my opinion, is crucial to the success or downfall of this Intranet), but the Data Center has offered SharePoint as an option.
Some of the main features are profile pages (with pictures of users), a 'dashboard' page on which people will be able to see, at a glance, information they need to see for the day, and Archdiocesan news.
Now, I know everything can be prototyped pretty easily in Drupal, and I have most of the features complete (see a dashboard mockup here, along with notes on its implementation). But is SharePoint worth investing some time in?
Does anyone else have any experience with SharePoint? It seems that, in order to simply edit the templates, I'll need to use a Windows PC and download SharePoint Designer 2007 (ugh).
Here's another highly relevant link: Ideas and Further Reading for the Archdiocesan Intranet
Mon, 08/30/2010 - 5:22pm
#2
Any backend requirements?
Hey there! I read your list of pros/cons and the link on your dev site. My question is whether there are any backend considerations that would make one better than the other. Specifically, things like authentication and groupware (Exchange).
Let me preface this by saying I am a huge fan of Drupal and use it whenever I can. I have never administered Sharepoint but I've had to use it. Emphasis on the word "had". It was kludgy at best, but it may just have been the way it was deployed.
LDAP can answer the authentication issue if you have a centralized tree (AD, eDirectory, etc). I'm sure you already have this link, but just in case: http://drupal.org/project/ldap_integration
As for groupware (email, calendar, etc.), the simplest way is just to link to the existing OWA. If you REALLY want to display content from Exchange, maybe you could do it with web services? I don't really know, but it seems feasible.
You mentioned document management in your list of pros. This is a new Drupal module that looks very promising. It apparently includes a Windows client. http://drupal.org/project/filedepot
I think your mockup looks pretty good! Having built an employee intranet with Drupal before, that is my tool of choice. Flexible, OSS, easy to administer, easy for users, free...what's not to like about it? :)
Mon, 08/30/2010 - 5:47pm
#3
Flexible, OSS, easy to
Flexible, OSS, easy to administer, easy for users, free...what's not to like about it? :)
True that!
I hadn't heard of the File Depot module; that merits some research...
Also, I know one of the big issues for calendaring is the ease of access for shared calendars and reserving rooms (one of the frequent uses of our calendar system). It'd be awesome if either (a) Microsoft opened their data through an API so I could at least show or add information from any external system, or (b) I could at least embed a view of a calendar supplied by Exchange somewhere on the site. Ah well.
Tue, 08/31/2010 - 2:01pm
#4
Hummm...big company I work for...
Let's just say I used to not really care too much about whether one used MS or not..but after what I have seen and dealt with...no thanks. MS seems to design their products to perpetuate the sale of more of their products. We spent millions on a project that at the end of the day can only download a table as either excel or PDF.. the excel is formatted with hyperlinks that makes the spreadsheet almost unusable unless you copy and paste it as values into another sheet. When MS was asked if there was anthor option...ei .csv or txt....sorry, "excel is all we have".
Between, Panels and Blocks, there is not much you can't do with drupal...
Developer beware...I am just saying.
John
Tue, 08/31/2010 - 9:59pm
#6
Ugh...sorry...
Hope I don't offend anyone, but I am not a big SharePoint fan.
I've built a couple portals back in my IT days (where everything was running on MS).
OK...here's a scenario that MIGHT be worthwhile...
If the Intranet is on:
1. A complete Windows environment. PCs>Servers. Preferably the latest servers and sharepoint editions (I stopped keeping track at 2007). It relies heavily on Active Directory.
2. Is all on a local LAN. I suppose some folks have had success accessing it from the Internet through a proxy server...sorry...I don't know what they call it anymore...
3. You heavily invest in end-user training. Frankly, I've never seen it work. Most folks don't get it and only scratch the surface in what it can do for them.
The problem is that Sharepoint was originally just developed for internal workgroups at MS and marketing got a hold of it and thought...hey!...enterprise document management! Big $$$.
Jeff...if you get roped into this one, you have my sympathy. I burned months on that stuff and in the end didn't have much end-user buy-in.
...ok...just looked at your dashboard mock-up. Nice. You can do something comparable with Sharepoint...but first you have to learn the MS way of doing things, and it ain't intuitive.
Like Anthony mentioned above, if there's an LDAP module for Drupal that would allow you to plug into the Active Directory with what you've got, that'd be the way to go.
Wed, 09/01/2010 - 7:34am
#8
Migrating from Sharepoint to Drupal
I can't offer much here in the way of comparison. But I will say that I'm helping merge 13 intranets of a hospital system into one central Drupal site, because the company has decided that Drupal is the way to go. Included in that scope is (somehow) moving all the data from (literally) thousands of Sharepoint sites. So, while I certainly have my work cut out for me, still, I think this speaks to the versatility of Drupal. That's a major commitment from a big company to Drupal, if nothing else.
Thu, 09/02/2010 - 4:05pm
#10
Yep
Yep, it's going to keep me busy for awhile.
They use Active Directory, and we authenticate to it using the LDAP authentication module. They also use Windows Integrated Authentication to give users a single sign-on experience. Pretty cool.
For document management... that's still being discussed. I just found the filedepot module, which looks promising. We're also evaluating Alfresco as a repository backend, with Drupal as the front-end. I'm not sure which way we'll go, but I'm (as always) rooting for "do it with drupal".
Sat, 09/25/2010 - 4:46am
#12
SSO for drupal
Humm...Perhaps you should look into the kerberos module for apache and webserver_auth for drupal.
I'm building a pro/con list here: http://archstldev.com/node/545
Advancing the faith.