What's a good CMS for an intranet site?

Question

I know this question has been tossed around by many developers and designers. I just got finished with my companies intranet site using joomla 1.5 with a custom bulit template and modifying almost everything in joomla. It got me thinking if I should be using an enterprise CMS instead of an free open source CMS. I almost went with wordpress, but the company wanted joomla for there site. It was a great for me to jump into another CMS and learn, but is there a better CMS out there that meant for intranet or does it really matter at all?

Solution 1

Try OpenAtrium, its free.

http://www.openatrium.com

Solution 2

If you're planning an intranet project using a CMS, then you'll need to clarify a couple of requirements before choosing the right one. I have a blog post with some simple choices for choosing a cms for an intranet, more specifically on collaboration and community features. But other more basic requirements are:

• Is there a technology stack that the organization prefers/uses? Does it need to be on-premise or cloud based? This will filter down the candidates
• Is the Intranet for just posting read-only notices and information, or are community features (groups, lists, news feeds, etc)
• Does the Intranet require SSO so that organization members can seamlessly interact with content based on their identity?
• What sort of budget is available for the Intranet? All CMS installs have a cost, even the ones without any subscription cost.
• Is document and file management an important requirement?
• Are customizations needed for any specific Intranet functionality or connectivity to other systems?

Wordpress will do a simple intranet well, but will start to become more work if you start getting complex requirements around authentications, groups and social functionality. If on the LAMP stack and looking for more complex requirements, look at Drupal or Joomla. On the Windows/.NET side there have been suggestions in this answer already - the choices span from full commercial answers such as Sharepoint to those available open source and commercially licensed like Dnn.