Introduction

Intranet managers often find that they are directly involved in decisions about selecting a new CMS or search application. Usually this is driven by the apparent inability of the current CMS to meet requirements; sometimes by concern about the level of technical support from the vendor, systems integrator or internal resources. In larger companies it is not unusual for there to be more than one CMS in use, especially if the company has grown through acquisition, and often there can be different version releases of the same CMS. Another common scenario is that the intranet and the website both use the same CMS; there is a good business case for changing the CMS to meet the website requirements, resulting in the intranet ending up on a totally unsuitable platform.

Specifying and selecting new CMS, search, social media and collaboration software can be quite challenging, because the daily management of the intranet has to be continued, and on top of this work a substantial amount of time will have to be dedicated to the process of selecting and implementing the software. The process will involve working very closely with an IT department, which is unlikely to be able to offer much experience of CMS and search software to the intranet team.

Over the last few years the selection process has moved on from being one in which vendors were provided with a table of functional requirements and the responses were scored and tabulated so that the vendor with the highest score could be given the contract. (And it was not unusual for there to be several hundred requirements.) The focus has now switched to being one in which the emphasis is not on what might be regarded as the nominal functionality of the application, but on what the application will enable the organization to achieve.

Intranet content management

The main differences between an intranet and a website, which may make a CMS designed for website use unsuitable for an intranet, have been summarized in Chapter 6.

There are many different CMS solutions for intranets, ranging in price from zero- or nominal-cost open-source applications right up to portal products such as IBM WebSphere. Somewhere in the middle in cost terms comes Microsoft SharePoint.