How To: Creating Your Corporate Intranet Using WordPress by Dean Sabatino is a fascinating look at how to change WordPress from a personal blog to a corporate Intranet Content Management System (CMS) for communicating and exchanging information within a company.
This article explains the process I used to develop a corporate Intranet site using WordPress blogging software along with the Apache web server, PHP, MySQL database and administration tools.
Our corporate Intranet was several years old and the design was based on our old corporate website look and feel. With the launch of the company’s new public website in early 2005, we clearly needed an update. The thought was to keep our new branding consistent and take the look and feel of the new public corporate site and apply the colors and styles to a new private internal employee Intranet.
He lists the modifications and enhancements he made to the new company WordPress Intranet site and reports on the results:
Once I had the prototype working I presented the site to the HR department and the CEO and both loved the format. The flexibility to upload fresh information easily and post date sensitive topics right on the home page is a feature they were looking for but unavailable on our old static page intranet site.
I scheduled a day for transferring the setup to the actual Intranet machine and followed the detailed notes I had kept while building the prototype. All went smoothly and we had a new Intranet site up in about 2 hours! I was able to train an HR person on how to use the administration tool after creating a user account for her. Initial feedback from employees has been great. With the new system in place I’ve already added a section of downloadable logos and I’m planning to add a page on Safety Policies and expand the IT/Software development section. With WordPress in place it will be a breeze.
Lorelle on WordPress 
6 Comments
Hi,
I came across your article. As a matter of fact I would like to know how to have a corporate look ‘n feel .
A screenshot would have helped.
Cheers .
A screenshot of what? How a corporate website should look? That’s up to the corporation, which usually hired professional website designers who understand totally what a corporate website should look as it represents the company, not a “corporate look”. To see what I mean, check out Google, MSN, Microsoft, Boeing, and any corporation to see that they are not all the same. The article I linked to has more information on the specific technical elements needed to help a corporate site work versus a simple blog, not the looks. The looks are a different issue.
Hi there. I must agree with you that by using wordpress, it certainly helped our company to create our own corporate website! It is so much easier and it certainly helped us to get better pagerank in google and other search engines. also, it is so much convenient for us to have interaction with our clients! Anyways, just drop by our site for our own home made Theme called Banteay-Srey. This theme has a charity feel towards it.
I implemented wordpress in place of our corporate intranet last week and so far the success has been excellent in every sense! Our executive committee is contributing content, our HR department is loving the flexibility and the staff are finally seeing value in the default homepage.
A single day of research and playing around exposed several plugins that have addressed security issues, allowed users to upload profile pictures, empowered employees to contribute content, linked the WP user admin interface directly into our exchange server for authentication and user contact management. Some additional things we’re wanting to do now are anonymous feedback forms, surveys, youtube-style privately hosted videos.
I can say that no one used our intranet for anything prior to implementing WordPress.
Is it possible to make a WordPress blog partly intranet and partly internet based?
I want one section of the blog restricted and this should be intranet based viewed by corporate employees only.The other section should be viewable by everyone,which is to be used for Marketing and this should be internet based.
Thank you for your help.
I would check the various Membership Plugins and such to close off different sections of WordPress. The intranet version of WordPress didn’t go anywhere.
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