Project Title

Deploy Joomla as a College Intranet

Project Type

Consultancy \ Development

Brief

Find the best fit leading open source web platform to meet the feature brief \ Customise and develop that platform to meet the brief exactly

Solihull College had decided to replace the in-house developed Intranet with a Content Management System to ease administration and reduce the need for web services staff to be involved with day-to-day content updates.

A brief had already been formulated that outlined exactly a minimum set of functionality and an additional wishlist.

Staff at Ember Platforms were initially invited to research the functionality existing in the main open source CMS solutions, produce a matrix of specifications, then install and demonstrate each web platform to stakeholders.

After the functionality matrix had been produced and the live demonstrations delivered, the college decided to go with Joomla (over Alfresco, Drupal and Moodle as Intranet).

Ember platforms staff provisioned servers, installed and configured the Linux environment and packages then went on to provision a Joomla production platform. This platform was heavily customised with a Joomla theme, stock plugins and custom developed code to integrate the new Intranet, sourcing users from existing systems and integrating with AD for authentication.

The system was later extended by Ember staff to support Kerberos, which added external authentication.