Hello,

Long time no speak, hope I  find you well   I've been hopelessly busy of late and enjoying a little writers block but I've found something to write about yay!  It has been mentioned that this entry is a little long sorry for that hope you make it to the end

Recently I was asked to look for an Intranet product.  

Our basic criteria was:

* Some simple content management, and rich text content creation
* Easy to use/update via a browser
* Ability to integrate with an existing Domino infrastructure
* Blogging
* Forums
* Wiki
* Dynamic content pulled through to homepage (via RSS?)

During the initial review we eliminated:

* Community Server
* Plone
* Quickr
* TMPublisher Pro by Tormatrix. 


OK, so at this point I really didn't have very much but I had an idea I took these databases:

* DominoWiki (openNTF)
* domBulletin (openNTF)
* IBM Blog

and wrote a quick Content Management Database (for a homepage and other static content). I added a simple frameset with a basic menu system for navigation.  After a couple of hours work things looked promising......

The framesets had to go so we set about giving the databases a consistent header and footer and via css we applied (as much as possible) a consistent layout and look to the templates.

To gather and display dynamic content in various places around the site I thought we could use an RSS aggregator.  Eventually I found Studio Blog Reader by Workflow Studios which was released to openNTF.  I had to fix a few things (the XSL Stylesheet and customise some of the agent code) and then embed the reader in my content management system.  Right now it seems to be working fine blog entries & other announcements appear on the homepage via RSS!

You might be interested in why we choose to use the IBM Blog template rather than Declan Lynchs blogging template Blogsphere.  Personally I like Blogsphere best but the IBM blog is a bit simpler and currently has a functional web admin interface.  The new version of Blosphere will have that I understand.  Additionally Blosphere is fairly good at announcing new content to all sorts of external sites and we felt that it would require additional work to try and eradicate all of that (we're building an intranet after all ).

For the rich text editing I built on the work of others and incorporated FCKEditor into the homepage and static page forms.  The editor allows you to create links for the notes:// protocol, images stored in Domino (thanks to Ben Langhinrichs), and links to other static content in the Intranet as well the usual rich text editing.

We also needed to be able to search the "intranet" and other notes databases from within the site.  That's where NCT Search comes in.  I use the search in two different ways there's an advanced search facility that allows users to search a wide set of notes databases and a quicksearch.  Quicksearch uses Ajax to invoke an agent that searches the Intranet databases.

What we have now is a fairly functional Intranet site.  We can manage all of the css, content for the home page from one single place.  We can roll out new blogs in less than a minute, there are a few bugs but we stand a good chance of fixing them ourselves.

The important bit:
I think there's a gap in the Domino market.  If you're a small to medium sized Domino shop and you want a Domino based intranet which you can update with a browser you'll probably be out of luck.  What if the openNTF contributors (for example) got together and created an intranet suite ("The openNTF intranet Suite")which was easy to manage (content and look and feel) using perhaps a simplified version domCMS to handle static content.  If they could go a step further and offer support and customisation services that would really plug the gap.

What do you think?