Intranets The Drupal Way

A Guide to using Drupal for

Intranets and how to evaluate
whether it is the right choice for
your organization

Authors
Derek Reese is a self-directed full-stack developer experienced
with web-based and internal enterprise software and pipeline
development, as well as art and design tools and assets. Derek is
a Drupal developer at Mediacurrent and has been working with
the platform since Drupal 5.
@DerekReese

@dawnashleealy

mediacurrent.com

Dawn Aly is Mediacurrents Director of Digital Strategy. In addition

to digital strategy, her extensive Drupal experience includes a
background in project and brand management. Whether she is
driving the vision for conversion optimization, building complex
content strategy campaigns, or simply improving SEO, Dawn's
ultimate goal is to create a brand experience that will surprise
and delight users.

Im familiar with Drupal, but is it the right

platform for my Intranet?
Best known as the open-source powerhouse Content
Management System (CMS) behind external websites like
Whitehouse.gov and Weather.com, Drupal is also a
powerful choice for Intranets.
With its customization-friendly technical architecture and
wide variety of collaboration and user management tools,
Drupal has been proven effective for corporate Intranets of
all sizes and industries.
If youre considering a Drupal Intranet for your organization,
this eBook will help to guide you through that decision.

mediacurrent.com

The Open Source Advantage

Fact: 78% of companies now run on open source software. In this new era, corporate Intranets
are no longer confined to proprietary platforms. As proven solution for Intranets, Drupal offers
several compelling advantages to businesses:

Community Support Perhaps the biggest strength of Drupal is its extensive support
network backed by thousands of developers. This means continuous improvement toward
performance and functionality for the lifetime of your Intranet.

Extra Security Drupal relies on a dedicated security team to protect against security
threats such as viruses and unauthorized access. Together with Drupals vast development
and administrator community, the team scrupulously monitors and patches issues.

Built for Accessibility Web accessibility means making your Intranet available to all users,
regardless of their (dis)abilities. Legal issues are often a concern as there may be risks
associated with non compliance. The Drupal community is strongly committed to
accessibility, ensuring that all features of Drupal core conform with the World Wide Web
Consortiums guidelines. To learn about the legal and policy issues surrounding
accessibility that may impact your organization, check out the Web Accessibility Initiatives
resource guide.

Source:9th Annual Future Of Open Source Survey.

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If Your Site is Already Running on

Drupal...
There are several advantages to building an Intranet with the same platform:

Enhance user management across the organization by adding single sign-on

capability (there are a number of module options available for this)

Lessen the talent overhead required to manage more than one web technology
for both web properties

Deliver a consistent brand and user experience with an Intranet that performs
as a seamless extension of your public website

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Evaluating Drupal
Key considerations for assessing Drupal as an Intranet platform.

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Your Existing Stack

What can Drupal can do for my Intranet?

The most important aspect of evaluating Drupal with

an existing stack is knowing what it can work well with:

Wikis
Media/Digital Asset Management Systems
Messaging / Social Media Platforms
Time-Tracking / Resourcing Toolkits
HR Management Products

These toolsets can and should remain in-place and integrate cleanly with Drupals
architecture and design - as the face of your companys employee experience.
Drupal is the best at handling content, including news posts, announcements, custom
employee apps/processes, and resource organization. It has a built-in taxonomy and
tagging system that makes it easy to organize and display your existing content. Drupal
excels at replacing antiquated workspace, news, forum, search, and link portal apps.

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Project Scope

Is Drupal a fit for my budget and number of employees?

Need for Scale

Built for scalability, Drupal is an effective platform for Intranets both big and small. At
Mediacurrent, weve leveraged Drupals versatility for many Intranet projects, from our own
company Intranet up to enterprise-level clients with over 10,000 employees.
With Drupal you have access to thousands of developers and hundreds of agencies available
to support the product, which means organizations of any size can find labor to support
their site. In addition, Drupals open source licensing offers hundreds of feature possibilities
typically not available in most other CMSs.
Budget
Proprietary CMS Intranet platforms often pigeonhole organizations into annual licensing
contracts, typically based on number of users, while offering limited feature options.
Compared to these costly proprietary platforms, the cost of running a Drupal Intranet is
significantly less.
Your individual budget will vary depending on the required customization.
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Distributions

Can Drupal provide an Intranet solution thats ready out-of-the-box?

Starting with a Drupal Distribution as a foundation may be

a best option if your Intranets functional requirements do
not involve a high level of customization and launching
quickly
is the highest priority.
.
Drupal Distributions such as Open Atrium or Openlucius
are pre-configured installations that already have
embedded
Intranet-type features such as groups,
.
commenting, activity streams, following, trending
content, blogging, and a customizable user interface.
Moreover, because Drupals architecture is based on the
concept of overrides, these Distributions can be further
enhanced with custom backend or frontend features
without compromising the default features theyre
packaged with.
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Customization
Drupal.org houses thousands of modules that let you build a high functioning Intranet with
little or no programming required. The possibilities are almost endless, but what does your
Intranet really need? Youll want to consider the following.

Collaboration Features. Drupals core collaboration modules such as Forum and

Comment, combined with numerous collaboration modules available in the Drupal
community, offer the ability to create a rich social business experience.

Easy Integration. With Drupal, you can integrate with almost any other proprietary
and third-party platform on the market. Plus, it easily integrates with employee
account management systems like Active Directory and Central Authentication
Service.

Content Management Capabilities. Drupals highly configurable content and file

management features provide the ability to build an Intranet tailored to meet unique
asset management needs.

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Drupal 8
Drupal 8 is a snug fit for the next generation of Intranets.
Not only is it object-oriented and built with industrystandard libraries, but its organization and powerful API
allow it to scale to the demands of massive growth and
infrastructure requirements. Previously impossible
requirements, such as supporting teams of hundreds of
simultaneous developers and integrations, are now built into
the Drupal way of thinking.
Drupal 8 makes it easy for teams to asynchronously deploy
features, tools, and content across your entire Intranet. It
allows responsive teams to be their best and build sites and
organization that is ready for both mobile access and full
desktop experiences.

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BUILD ENGAGEMENT
The Intranet platform you choose is just one half of the equationthe other half is knowing
your users. In the following exercise, youll gain foundational understanding of how
different stakeholders will experience your Intranet.

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Introduction to Intranet Personas

Intranet user personas are semi-fictional representations of
your everyday Intranet users. Persona profiles deliver a
deeper understanding of your users by focusing on one
character who embodies the predominant qualities of the
larger organization.
Persona profiles may also be leveraged to...

Identify use-cases
Determine functionality requirements
Prioritize content and activity
Increase usage and adoption
Inform internal PR/Communications strategy

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Build Your Intranet Personas

With persona profiles, youll gain insight into your users behavior to kickstart your Intranet
strategy and inform decisions throughout the project. Consider these categories to get
started:
Background
Keep your profile personable by adding a headshot
(avoid stock imagery), first and last name. Next,
define your personas role in the company. For
example, a university Intranet might develop
personas for "professors," students, and "faculty."
Last, assess their level of technology literacy.
Day in the Life
How does the Intranet fit into the daily activity of
the persona? When, where and how are they most
likely to use it? Will multiple devices be used?
About how much time will be spent on the
Intranet?
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Problems and Questions the Intranet

Can Solve (Use Cases)
In this section, define a likely use case for
your persona and the desired Intranet
usage behavior.
Desired Online Experience
This is where you can detail specifics about
the user experience. For example, your
users might prefer to search for their
information instead of filter for it.

Increase Employee Buy-In

Include the following categories if you need get employee "buy-in" to use the Intranet:
Psychographics
Consider your personas values and motivators. What makes this persona choose one thing
over something else? Are they goal oriented or laid back?
Marketing Channels
What trusted sources does this persona rely on for news and information? Ex. social media,
work colleagues, industry sites, etc.
Current Beliefs
Detail the personas likely beliefs about a new Intranet tool.
Most Common Objections to the Intranet
Explore examples where a persona might be skeptical or resistant to using /adopting the
Intranet.
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Intranet Persona Template

Day in the life:

Problems/questions the website can solve:

Desired online experience:

Need to build employee "buy-in"? You may

also consider:

NAME:
ROLE:
TECHNICAL LITERACY

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Psychographics
Marketing channels
Current beliefs about the Intranet
Most common objections to using the
Intranet

DRUPAL IN ACTION
Solutions for common Intranet challenges the Drupal Way.

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Intranet Challenge: Integration & Migration

Challenge
Most companies that already have an Intranet have a large
investment in their current Intranet stack. Every new
technology added on creates overhead.
The Drupal Solution
Drupal is one of the easiest platforms to add integrations to.
Just a simple search on drupal.org reveals hundreds of
community-built modules with more being added every day.
Organizations that already have invested in PHP will find
developing for Drupal a familiar experience, and those that
rely on modern tech like Javascript and mobile apps for
employees can quickly open up Drupals REST-ful API to
provide content streams, editing interfaces, and tools like
search and taxonomy.
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Intranet Challenge: Organization

Challenge
Too much duplicate content and slow search capabilities make it difficult for employees to
find the information they need.
The Drupal Solution

Superfast search engines: Technologies like Apache Solr and Google Search can be
plugged into a Drupal Intranet to speed up site search. The easy-to-configure Google
Search Appliance (GSA) module gives users the ability to search across thousands of
Intranet pages and other corporate data. Integrating the GSA is as simple as filling in a
couple of form fields and clicking save.
A Way to Reduce Content Clutter: Drupal makes it easier to avoid duplicate content
with the ability to refine user roles. Drupal allows Intranet content editors to easily
publish rich, search-friendly content. When appropriate, news and information can be
displayed recurrently across the site.

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Intranet Challenge: Collaboration

Challenge
All quiet on the Intranet front: features to encourage user
collaboration are antiquated or nonexistent.
The Drupal Solution
Add a social layer. Drupal's rich feature set provides users the
ability to exchange information via forums, streams,
webforms and commenting.
When combined with social networking modules for
microblogging (Statuses), voting (Flag, Vote Up/Down,
Fivestar, Rate), and following/friending (Flag Follow, Flag
Friend), Drupal is capable of running as a full blown social
business platform.

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Intranet Challenge: Mobile Design

Challenge
Creating an Intranet that is responsive on mobile devices.
The Drupal Solution
A responsive Intranet is the best way to keep up with users on
the go. Drupals mobile first mindset makes this possible. In
fact, Drupal 8, the latest version, boasts out-of-the-box
responsive functionality. Drupal 7 shines with many
responsive, mobile friendly themes to chose from.

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Intranet Challenge: Personalization

Challenge
Intranet users have diverse informational needs based on their
department, office locations, and other factors. Yet many
Intranet have homepages that are one size fits all and lack
personalization.
The Drupal Solution
Drupals personalization capabilities allow you to create a more
engaging user experience. One approach is to let users
bookmark content that will help to populate their homepage. Its
also possible to automatically detect the Intranet users IP
address and display location-specific news and information.

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Intranet Challenge: Monitoring Analytics

Challenge
A disadvantage inherent in many proprietary systems is that they allow for less
customization and require a more cumbersome third party integration process.
The Drupal Solution
Drupal can integrate with many third party technologies, like Google Analytics web statistics
tracking system. This module allows you to add statistics features to your site such as:

Single/multi/cross domain tracking

Selectively track/exclude certain users, roles and pages
Monitor what type of links are tracked (downloads, outgoing and mailto)

This will let you see a wealth of user data to help prove the ROI of your Intranet.

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DEVELOP
Thanks to the Drupal community, thousands of modules exist to extend Intranet functionality.
Here are a few of the most versatile modules for the Intranet portal environment.

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Intranet Modules
User Management

Collaboration

Single Sign On (SSO) is easy with

Modules like LDAP or CAS that can be
used to integrate with employee account
management systems (like Active
Directory and Central Authentication
Service).

Useful modules to promote user

interaction and content contributions
include Advanced Forum, Comment and
Privatemsg.

Social Networking
When combined with social networking
modules for microblogging (Statuses),
voting (Flag, Fivestar, Rate), and
following/friending (Flag Follow, Flag
Friend), Drupal is capable of running as a
full blown social business platform.
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To separate content by department,

the Organic Groups module allows
users to create and manage their own
'groups'. There are lots of preferences
to configure groups to meet your
specific needs.

Intranet Modules
Content/Asset Management

Content Publishing Workflow

The Media module can be used to

manage on-site and external media
asset libraries.

Some departments dont require a lot of

checks and balances for curating and
publishing content, but for those that
do, modules like Workbench suite and
Revisioning feature highly configurable
publishing workflows.

If a defined publishing workflow with

sophisticated access control is required,
the Workbench suite can be utilized (it
seamlessly integrates with Media).
Diff provides a granular view of any text
and/or field values that changed from
one version of content to the next.

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The Maestro module is a workflow

engine/solution used to facilitate simple
and complex business process
automation. For example, it can be
leveraged to create a document publish
workflow with an editor and publisher
review phase.

Intranet Modules
Integrations
Drupal can integrate with limitless
numbers of third party software. Many
popular packages are already available as
contributed modules, and even more
such as IBM Notes and Microsoft
Sharepoint are exposed via standard APIs
like CMIS.
For custom scenarios and handling, the
time-tested RESTful and REST Web
Services modules allow developers to
easily create powerful workflows and
communication between Drupal and
existing software.

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Search, Tagging, and

Organization
Drupal core search can be expanded
upon with the Search API module. In
addition, the Apache Solr module
provides Solr support. Complex queries
are a cinch with the Solr Search API.
Drupals Taxonomy system is an
extremely powerful organizational tool
and there are plenty of supporting
modules that make it a breeze to use.
TagClouds adds support for the popular
cloud visual, and Taxonomy Menu turns
organization into site menu structure.

Mediacurrent

Thank You

After coming up with a list of keywords you want to use for your SEO strategy, research these
keywords using a keyword tracking tool such as the Google Keyword tool.

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