Intranet Step 2

I didn’t get to post about it yesterday, but I did take step two into creating a $0 budget intranet, getting Uniform Server up and running on the old Windows Me machine. It’s a pretty straight-forward process, the only problem I ran into is a known bug in version 3.2 when running on older Windows OS’es. (This forum post says it happens with 98 and NT but it clearly occurs on Me as well, I’m just probably the only person in the world trying to run this, or anything else, on Me!) So I’m running version 3.1 for now, waiting for 3.3 to be released. Hopefully, this is the only time using Me will be an issue, which it should be. Everything will be running off the server software and not be dependent on Me.

Now that the server environment is in place, the next step is to try and find the various open-source bits and pieces that would be nice to use in our office. What I’d like to find is some PHP or Perl stuff that will allow for shared calendars, maybe a staff database, some easy to create web forms, and a couple of blogs to use in place of sending emails to everyone on staff for specific purposes. I’d also like to have some file management tool that makes finding some of the more common shared documents easier to find than they currently are. I think my first stop is going to be OpenSource CMS, to test drive some CMS apps. Or if anyone has some suggestions, hit me with ’em!

As I continue down this path I’ll be sure to keep things documented. Perhaps, I’ll eventually move all of these entries off into a different page to keep them together and not lost among the other things I post to my blog. We’ll see how it goes.

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