An intranet for every organization
It might be so obvious that I should just keep quiet, but an intranet can and should be a vital part of any organization’s infrastructure. With the ever-increasing ease of deploying data-driven web applications, such as blogs, wikis, and content management systems (CMS), you can easily have a customized intranet portal implemented for your organization in less than a day. The structure, traceability, and searchability that an intranet application such as a wiki or CMS can bring to your accumulated business data can yield big payoffs for the future of your organization.
It’s information that drives the life of an organization. If your company has an internet site, chances are that the public face of your organization rests on a much larger body of information that is not readily available to the general public, either because of proprietary concerns or because it’s just not ready for public consumption. The image in my mind is like a tree with a complex subsurface root structure or an iceberg where only a small percentage of the total mass is visible above the surface. Having any kind of structure at all to your intranet data can go a long ways toward improving your business processes, making information more persistent, easier to access, and faster to communicate between individuals.
Killer Apps of the Future: Knowledge Management Systems
There’s an up and coming genre of software applications called “knowledge management”, and I’m excited to watch what happens in this field over the next few years. The promise of a single software system to manage all of an organizations accumulated knowledge sounds like a Holy Grail of sorts. If it’s ever achieved, the solution for organizations to manage their intranets will be easy.
Agile software development practices
I am a big believer in iterative software development. The Agile model for software development is the one I currently look to for guidance in steering my projects. At the heart of the Agile model is the set of principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto.
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On the use of WordPress themes
A recent newsvine post suggests that many WordPress themes are overused to the point of making them annoying or even intellectually worthless. While I can see the point to a certain degree, a part of me wants to believe that content is still the measure of an excellent blog site. I have to admit, however, that the truth is really in the the union of good content and good style. For better or for worse, the prevalence of some themes, especially the defaults shipped with WordPress, doesn’t allow for much stimulation of that part of the brain that is always looking for something new. So, I encourage everyone out there using a common WordPress theme to take a couple of hours to learn some basic css and tweak your theme a little bit. You’ll find the effort will pay big dividends to your readers and your own sense of individuality. For those of you looking for a great book, check out Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, published by O’Reilly. You can actually learn css and enjoy the process!
Why I chose a combination of Joomla! and WordPress
There are so many possibilities for constructing websites. My review of modern web techniques led me to believe I should invest some time to learn and use a content management system (CMS) to handle my website content. The idea of separating content from presentation really resonated with me.
Off-the-shelf CMS systems, both commercial and open-source, provide such a wealth of functionality to leverage that it just doesn’t make sense to develop a new site from scratch with no third-party software solutions. But, there are so many choices? How can one not be completely frozen trying to weight the pro’s and con’s of each route. Well, for me, the winning ticket came down to the combination of stable, well-documented code and good support, even if it meant a trade-off with flexibility. Joomla! is the CMS I chose for the “business” part of my site, and WordPress is the engine I chose to run the blog site you are now reading. So, why two different CMS engines?
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