Welcome to the Computerminds Intranet (demo)

Computerminds are now offering a 2 day training course Building intranets with Drupal covering all the main modules (views, og, taxonomy etc) , strategies (organic groups or not?), integration with existing systems and the basics of theming.

There is a growing trend for companies to harness the power of social networks, turning their intranets into dynamic collaborative workspaces. The advantages of using the social network model for your intranet our numerous

• They are fun! Everyone loves connecting with their friends on facebook, so why not allow staff to connect with each other on the intranet - encourage the growth of those all important soft social networks in house

Its safe to say that blogs (or weblogs to give them their original name) as a universally accepted concept, even if a user does not actively maintain a blog they will at least be aware of the concept. The nice thing about blogs is that readers do not expect a professional level of copy writing, they are more interested in the content - this makes them a very time efficient way of publishing news, information, views, opinions and general noise!

Allowing and encouraging staff to run blogs on your intranet is a great way to "extract" information from them. Want to know what the head of accounts thinks about the state of the dollar, well check out his blog and see if he has written any thing there. Want to know what life is like in the trenches, have a read of the blogs from some of the junior staffers.

In this demonstration you can see we have added the user's most recent blog entries to their profiles (example here), as well as providing a dedicated blog page for each user (second example here)

By allowing your staff to comment and discuss content on your intranet not only are you gaining valuable feedback, but you are also building a sense of community and participation. Your users are also excellent proof readers and fact checkers - if you there is a mistake in the original post then chances are it will be corrected by someone in the comments.