Managing Intranet Textual Content
As we are making our way through our external web redesign project, we’ve found many pages are Intranet textual content vs. the intended brochure-like content aimed at marketing our university. This was expected since the external site was the only tool available to our users at the time the Ingeniux CMS was originally implemented (2004). But now, we are sorting Internet content from Intranet content and are questioning how and/or if we should integrate this Intranet content with Luminis. We have roughly 7000+ pages of which 5-10% is likely Intranet related (350+ pages).
My question: How do you folks manage your Intranet textual content? We do not have the Luminis CMS but only the portal.
We are considering the following:
- A standalone Intranet site for content within an iFrame of Luminis.
- A channel solution where Intranet content is pulled from the Ingeniux CMS into a collection of channels but managed by Ingeniux.
- Recreating textual content in channels available in Luminis.
- A combination of the first two or all three above.
What have been your experiences with a similar situation as described above. Comments? Recommendations?
Thanks All!
Mike Childress
Eastern Washington University
intranet content
We have a separate web server for intranet content that can be reached by only certain on campus IP ranges.
We have links in our Portal to intranet content, and that is allowed by means of a proxy server, that recognizes whether the person is onsite or offsite. If offsite, the proxy server checks that they are logged into Luminis, and if so, lets them through to the intranet server.
RE: intranet content
Hi Jason,
Thanks for the response. Do your links from Luminis to your Intranet content open a new window to the Intranet site or do they open a page within an iFrame within Luminis? If they open within Luminis, how do users bookmark that Intranet content?
Thanks again,
Mike
intranet
We have them open up in a new window. It has led to a bit of confusion from time to time though. For instance, user A will bookmark an intranet link inside the portal, and it looks like:
ourproxyserver.edu:1234?url=intranetserver.edu/somepage.html
and then email that link to user B, who tries to open it from an email at home, and it of course doesn't work, as they do not have an active portal session.
But in general, users 'get it' and log into the portal before either clicking intranet links or using bookmarks. We could have allowed the proxy server to accept logins, which would have authenticated against our portal ldap, but chose to reinforce logging into the portal to use links, instead of encouraging people to bypass the portal and email links, or worse, someone with www.ourschool.edu edit access, putting a link on our www site directly into the intranet.
RE: intranet
Makes sense Jason. Thanks for the information. Much appreciated.
DCCC
Hello,
We at Delaware County Community College are also working on this issue. Our new public website redesign, which is coming this Summer, will not contain content for internal only usage. Most of our content in Luminis is internal only content. Our public website will use Acquia Drupal as the content management system. Our internal only content will be stored on the same Acquia Drupal CMS but it will only be viewable by going to Luminis which will single sign on into Acquia Drupal with credentials that allow read access for the internal only content. We plan on having our internal only content act like SSB links. When you click on an SSB link, it opens the SSB page inside of Luminis in a frame. We are going to do the same with internal only content on the CMS. In the future we also plan on creating some views of content from the CMS which we will display in the channels. I have already got our Acquia Drupal CMS to authenticate through Luminis LDAP and setup GCF to use Luminis LDAP credentials to automatically sign users into Acquia Drupal. The hard part will be setting up permissions to make sure none of the internal content accidentally becomes viewable by the public.
RE: DCCC
Thanks Mujtaba. This sounds very similar to where we might be heading at EWU. How will you decide which pages will merit getting pulled into channels vs being a part of the Intranet content? Will you be using Google Analytics or something similar to measure traffic in determining high usage pages,etc.?
Thanks again,
Mike
Currently we have some
Currently we have some minimal text/pictures in our channels and then we link to content on our public website. We are basically going to carry that over but instead link to the intranet site except the new site will have the added benefit of feeling more integrated with Luminis (kind of like SSB). We do use Google Analytics but I have not had a chance to setup filters so that tab names and other Luminis URLs are more understandable. Right now we are not getting a whole lot of benefit from the data we've collected using Google Analytics but once I setup the filters it should come in handy.
We are also exploring sharing content blocks from our intranet CMS so it displays the same content from a CMS content block within a channel.
inline frame channels?
Is any of your intranet content pulling into inline frame channels? If so, what are you doing with links within that channel? Are you forcing to open into new windows or are you somehow able to open them within the luminis frame like SSB links?
RE: inline frame channels?
Currently one of the concepts we've worked on is to pull the Intranet site (or any site for that matter) into a full inline frame under a "Intranet" tab by the simple add tab > tab type. One of our analysts developed a method that not only allows us to create links from anywhere (any channel under any tab) to a page or anchor within the Intranet site under the "Intranet" tab but also the ability to bookmark any Intranet page navigated to within that iFrame. This approach alleviates us from having to open new windows for Intranet textual content.
Maybe I can get our developer to chime in here on this post to explain. Thanks Julie!
luminis link access to intranet content
We modified the our xsl to accept a parameter through the URL for our "Intranet" framed tab.
While you can pull any content into this tab, this method for Intranet content should be used with caution if you can directly link to tabs within Luminis from another site. Do this without first checking validating the URLs being passed to the Internet tab will cause opportunities for cross-scripting attacks.
The details of our modification can be found at http://www.lumdev.net/node/48.
We are using this solution http://www.lumdev.net/node/2812 to pass the luminis url through the login screen
Intranet incorporated within luminis
Mike,
We also use Ingenuix for our public web site and our intranet pages. We also have the Intranet incoporated right into the luminis portal so that to faculty/staff and students it looks like it is all myBucknell even though the inranet content is completely seperate and managed through Ingenuix.
I'd be glad to answer share more details, answer questions or do a demo. Please contact me if you are interested.
Lisa Veloz
Bucknell University
lveloz@bucknell.edu
Thanks!
Thanks very much for the offer Lisa. I'll definitely be in touch to set something up.
Thanks again,
Mike