The document discusses social intranets and Drupal Commons. It outlines five main use cases for social intranets: static intranet, dashboard/homepage, profile and networking, group and project rooms, and mobile devices. It then examines how Drupal Commons supports each use case out of the box and areas that could be improved. The discussion focuses on search, hierarchical structures, group permissions, project management, and flexible group layouts.

1. 4
Nikolay Borisov, Ulf Sthamer
DrupalCon Munich 2012

2.  AGENDA
discussion
main use cases
social intranet
„Focus: Internal
collaboration with the help
of web 2.0 functionalities.“

3.  SOCIAL
BUSINESS
„In our definition social business
consists of both:
internal and external
social communication and
collaboration.“

4.  SOCIAL BUSINESS
Let‘s have a look on
the internal side now.

5. „Some information is relevant
for all employees,
other only for a few people.“

6. „But often the information that is
needed by a few people (and only
some experts can provide)
is more important for
productivity.“

7.  WORK ENVIRONMENT IN SOCIAL INTRANETS
All employees will Which information exists
utilization rate of information
get an iPad
in the company?
What‘s for
lunch today?
What is the Who collected
current project experience with
status? this supplier?
all information in the company
7

8. „While inhouse magazines or static
intranets helped in the past to push
corporate information for all employees,
the employees used e-mail, fileshare
and telephone (and the coffee kitchen)
to communicate with each other.“

9.  WORK ENVIRONMENT IN SOCIAL INTRANETS
What can be done
Better one-to-many
utilization rate of information
communication better today?
 authentic
 personal
 dialogue
Better Collaboration
 make knowledge
accessible
 find experts
 special information
intranet,
inhouse
magazine, e-mail, fileshare,
… telephone ...
all information in the company
9

10. „How can we use digital
systems – and especially
Drupal – to map this needs?“

11.  WORK ENVIRONMENT IN SOCIAL INTRANETS
What technology is necessary?
utilization rate of information
Drupal
CMS
How can we
Drupal Commons
extend here
Social Business Suite Drupal in the
future?
UC
all information in the company
11 CMS = Content Management System | UC = Unified Communications (Chat, Status, …)

12. „These days most customers
are interested in a
social business suite
for internal usage.“

13.  SOCIAL INTRANET
Information Sharing Knowledge
Management
Document
Idea generation
Management
Collaboration
and many more …

14.  SOCIAL INTRANET
Is social intranet about
applications?
Microblogs
Areas
Tasks
Forum
Profiles
Polls
Calendar Multimedia
Wiki (CMS)
Blog (News)
Documents

15. „Don‘t focus only on
functionalities!“

16. „In our experience there are
3 goals for every social intranet.
Yet every customer has another focus.“

17.  THREE GOALS OF SOCIAL INTRANETS
-1- -2- -3-
information and official collaboration and networking and
communication projects communities
CLASSICAL INTRANET PROJECT ROOMS INTEREST GROUPS

18. „In our projects we
identified 5 main use cases
for social intranets.“

19.  MAIN USE CASES
mobile static
devices intranet
group and
dashboard/
project
homepage
rooms
profile and
networking

20. „How do they look in
Drupal Commons
(out of the box)?“

21.  STATIC INTRANET
Drupal Commons doesn‘t offer the
hierarchical structure of a classical
intranet, but this functionality is easily
achievable with core and contributed
modules.
(Example from the documentation on
Drupal.org)

22.  DASHBOARD / HOMEPAGE
The dashboard is an essential part of a
social intranet and good possibility to
personalize your virtual working space and
filter the huge information flow for relevant
information.
Commons introduces a customizable user
dashboard with predefined widgets.

23.  PROFILE AND NETWORKING
Commons offers a complete set
of features for social networking
like activity streams, status
updates and user relationships.

24.  GROUP AND PROJECT ROOMS
For team collaboration Commons provides group
spaces similar to Jive SBS. Functionalities (like
blogging, Q&A, wiki, events) can be enabled
easily per group basis. In addition every group
has it‘s own activity stream.

25.  MOBILE DEVICES
MOBILE WEB NATIVE APPS
+ adapt one theme for multiple + access to the phone hardware
devices through responsive design
+ work offline
+ handling is almost the same as on
VS - seperate app for every phone OS
native apps
- no access to phone hardware

26. „Other leading Social
Business vendors like
IBM Connections and
Jive use Mobile Web.“

27.  MOBILE DEVICES
An example of the mobile accessibility using
responsive design in the future release of
Drupal Commons (based on Drupal 7).

28. „While Commons is an enormous
step towards social intranet,
there are still some
things to consider/improve…“

29.  DISCUSSION
 People/expert search within Drupal (Commons)
has to be improved
 Search within documents  try to use Apache Solr
 Classical hierarchical intranet structure should be added
to the group functionalities
 Drupal 6 has very rudimentary group permissions
 it‘s much better in Drupal 7
 Project management rooms with tasks are missing
 Flexible group layout can be realized
with panels and panelizer

30. Ulf Sthamer
de.linkedin.com/in/ulfsthamer
https://www.xing.com/profile/Ulf_Sthamer
www.socialsoftwarematrix.org
www.besser20.de
www.socialmediaevolution.de
Nikolay Borisov
https://www.xing.com/profile/Nikolay_Borisov
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jam343/1703693/