Introduction
We are living in a society where information overload is increasingly becoming a problem. With the advent of the web and e-mail, the amount of information exploded, and this has serious consequences for the workplace.
In this article, we will look at some of the benefits Plone can give you in the intranet area. Plone is not restricted to intranet use, but it is a useful example of how to use Plone to leverage the strengths of your company and give you a competetive advantage. This is not aimed to be a very technical article, but rather to try to explain why Plone has gained a such a large following, and what its main strengths are. It's mainly targeted towards decision makers and managers.
Recent developments in business processes have shown that company intranets aren't just for big companies anymore. Most companies, big and small, have the need to set up intranets and internet pages, and organize the available information. Good intranet design is essential, and becomes increasingly important as the company grows. To have all the information available at your fingertips from a standard web browser brings great power to management and employees alike.
Plone is a generic platform for web applications, as well as being a stand-alone Content Management System in itself, and has quickly become one of the biggest and most successful projects in the history of Zope. It builds on the well-proven design of the CMF framework for Content Management, and extends this with a lot of useful features. It also integrates well with existing solutions, and complements them instead of replacing them.
Low threshold solutions like Plone enable any company, big or small, to gather all their information and resources in one central, web-accessible area. It helps foster ownership of information and documents, which is of crucial importance to keep content up-to-date.
A very important advantage is that you achieve significant synergies through one common web platform, with unified content management and publishing for the intranet, Internet, and extranet. You can publish between the different parts of your net, and retain the individual differences in look and feel for the different parts, even though the content is the same.
Allowing users to post content is a good way of ensuring individuality and fresh news. Teams create their own home pages, while still adhering to the intranet design standards. This ensures a consistent design across the intranet, but lets groups highlight people, services, and events. Users own the content, and a central unit controls the design; this facilitates consistency and enables powerful communication.
http://plone.org/about/old/articles/plone-intranet/
