By daliff on

Most of my web development experience is using DreamWeaver; More recently MS Visual Web 2005.

I am looking to create an intranet; that will allow certain users to maintain static pages. I also want to connect to a host of SQL databases that we maintain, in order to create some dynamic pages.

Examples of what I want to (via SQL) give a graphical display of: (If graphs are unavailable, I will show tables.)

Help Desk work load (Trackit)
Email stats (Barracuda)
Etc...
I also want to display a birthday list from Our HR software. I may in the future add info from our ERP and CRM software.

Basically, my Boss does not want to open all of the different programs to get a snap shot of what is going on in our company. I don’t mind investing the time up front for development but, I do not want to make a career out of maintaining static pages. So I need a way for users to add things like company newsletters. Not to mention I’ve been looking for a reason to dabble with Drupal.

We also may add some blogging and/or forum feature.

I would like to run this on our windows server, but Apache is available.

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

I'm not seeing a question here ? : )

daliff’s picture

daliff commented

Is Drupal a viable solution for my website??

rcross’s picture

rcross commented

First thing I would point out is the handbook page regarding setting up a basic intranet. As for your project, it acually is two projects. You're looking to create an intranet and you're looking to intergrate all of your other various IT infrastructure. Drupal will work really well for your intranet and will probably provide a good amount of room to grow that infrastructure. However, your most difficult task will be intergrating all of your IT infrastructure - this will be the case whether you use drupal, roll-your-own, or some other project. Depending on the level of integration, you can either use a drupal block or page with raw php code to pull some data/functionality to those other databases. If you're looking for more interactive integration, you're probably looking at writing custom modules for drupal and/or potentially hacking the software for your other sql applications to work with drupal. Other options are to try to unify all your applications with single sign-on capabilities, usually with most corporations this is done with ldap. Without knowing all the specifics, its hard to know exactly the best path but that's also your job =)

As for platform, you should also look at the workload of this server. Obviously you're a windows shop, but I would recommend using a linux box since this is the whole LAMP stack. You can probably even use an older machine if converted to linux. Of course windows is do able and i'm pretty sure Drupal also works with IIS, but I find that windows boxes just don't hold up to the same rigors. IIS & php4 have a pretty well known memory issue and if you're not using the proper server copy of ms windows, you'll have problems with the number of concurrent connections to the server not to mention the fairly regular need to reboot a windows desktop.

--Ryan
www.ryancross.com
www.jamescrossinc.com

--Ryan
Ryan Cross
James Cross Construction Services
Project Management Software