By slane00 on

I've searched for questions along this line, and found a few hints, but nothing too specific.

I need to create both an intranet and an extranet. The intranet includes forums, blogs, a filesharing area, and collaborative looks like the books and perhaps a wiki. All users marked as employees (whatever that turns out to mean) should be able to access all areas of the intranet.

The extranet is divided conceptually into "mini-sites", one per client. Each mini-site includes a single forum or perhaps forum area specific to that client. Likewise a filesharing area. NO ONE may view a client area without being specifically granted access to that client area.

When a client logs in, it appears to them as though they have their own site, with their own filesharing and forum areas.

A user may be added to many client areas.

This creates functionality vaguely similar to our customized Bugzilla install, in which a user must be explicitly added to a project in order to see it, and a user sees and can search only on projects to which they have access.

Can Drupal do this out of the box? If not, can it do so with reasonable customization, or the addition of modules, or both? "Reasonable" means that upgrading is not so painful we avoid it :-)

I don't care how many "sites" I end up with, as long as creating a new client site and populating it with a few users is a five-minute process or so.

-- SGL

Comments

seec77’s picture

seec77 commented

They're really not hard to install, and can sit on the same database table (with different prefixes). They're not really hard to install either, and can use the same Drupal codebase, so they're not going to take up a lot of physical space on your web site. If not you might get a hard time with what you want to do. Or maybe not, I don't know, never tried! Sorry...

fallacious’s picture

fallacious commented

Just a thought.

beneeball’s picture

beneeball commented

Hi there,

Just wondering if ever made any progress on this matter. I'm in a similar situation where a client needs an extranet and I'd like to use Drupal, but I'm dealing with the same question, before we choose Drupal.

Can you let me know? Thanks a lot!

kyleschaper’s picture

kyleschaper commented

I am in a similar situation and would love to find out the easiest way to accomplish what you described - some thing like 'grovesite' or 'basecamp' or 'zoho projects', only completely in-house.

dgorton’s picture

dgorton commented

We had a similar set of needs and solved it with multiple installations:

  • We wanted to be the only people to log into our own site to update/administer
  • We wanted to use Drupal to share project docs, schedules, info, etc. with our clients
    • Clients should never see each other's info
    • Clients might have multiple projects

For us, this turned into two Drupal installs - one for our own site and one for our clients. The client tool uses Organic Groups. Ronan has been doing the development and it's still being refined so he can be more articulate about it. For those of you who might be in the Twin Cities group, we are planning on presenting it in an upcoming meeting - but it needs to be in better shape before that happens.

Drew
Gorton Studios
Some of our Drupal Sites

ronan’s picture

ronan commented

I ended up using og (http://drupal.org/project/og) to create the mini-sites you describe. Once you have that up and running it's simply a matter of piecing together the modules which give you the functionality you need. Creating a group and adding users is a little cumbersome but certainly fulfills your 5-minutes requirement.

one caveat:
By default og does not let you hide groups from people who are not members of that group. ie: each of your clients will be able to see the list of all of your other clients/mini-sites. I created a patch (http://drupal.org/node/79892) which fixes that.

I believe I also made some changes to og so that users who are only in 1 group do not have to choose a group 'audience' (ie: they can only post to their own group) when creating content. If there is interest, I can clean up that code and post it as a patch.

Ronan
------------------------------------
Gorton Studios - Websites that Work. http://www.gortonstudios.com/
http://www.gortonstudios.com/portfolio/technologies/drupal

------------------------------------
Ronan
Founder - NodeSquirrel - https://www.nodesquirrel.com/
Agency Tools Lead - Pantheon - https://www.pantheon.io/

slane00’s picture

slane00 commented

Drew, Ronan:

Sounds interesting. When you say multiple installs, does this mean multiple databases as well?

The reason multiple databases gave me pause initially was because of the need for my internal users to then need records in two places. HOWEVER, since I have figured out how to integrate Drupal with our Active Directory repository, this issue kind of dries up and blows away.

-- SGL

dgorton’s picture

dgorton commented

Yes - we are using two databases. We've only got one duplicate account (user 1 on both sites) so this wasn't a real concern for us. And, at the same time, it gives us complete separation between the two - so that our client tool needs don't have to have to be beholden to anything else.

Drew Gorton
Gorton Studios
Some of our Drupal Sites

slane00’s picture

slane00 commented

I'm still looking closely at organic groups for this, but it's not silver bullet, at least not in 4.7. OG, like most modules that mess with node access, can't be used with other node access modules. I need a variety of node access modules, at least OG and Taxonomy Access, so I'm hoping Drupal 5 sorts this out.

I'd also like a forum per group, but the og_forum module similarly inhibits core Drupal functionality, and development seems to have been abandoned.

I'd like to learn more about the multi-site option, maybe that's where we need to be.

raster’s picture

raster commented

I've been working on something like this for months now, though what I'm doing is much simpler, it still isolates clients from one another. Once I run it through it's paces with a few Drupal folks I know, I plan on writing up a tutorial.

magwep’s picture

magwep commented

I would be very interested in seeing what you've come up with. Any timing on when you think you'll be ready to post?

Lsmith’s picture

Lsmith commented

Steven lane I too am looking for the same thing you described in this post; five years later are you still using drupal, how did that project go? Any suggestions to how to accomplish the same thing? I am new to Drupal and so far there are too many modules to try and not enough time to start from scratch. Please can someone help me by suggesting which modules to use. Ie is organic groups still the best choice? What other supplemental modules/plugins do I need? Also I am not an advanced programmer. :-)

dgorton’s picture

dgorton commented

I'd go with Open Atrium these days -- a lot has changed in the intervening years and many different solutions and formulas can get you there -- but for a quick install and done - Open Atrium is the way to go.
http://openatrium.com/