Remake, redo, regret
Written 10 Jun 2004
At work I'm tasked with renovating our Intranet. No surprise really because we have 1 web developer. Of course we have plenty of project managers :) A deadline of July END is required for specs. A few months ago I began playing around with a new look for the sight, along with improving much of the infrastructure. Since I'm the only web developer on staff one very important goal to me is to keep everything simple. By simple I mean develop things that are easy for non web programmers to understand, using tools that are easy to use, find and learn. Simple, simple, simple.
Currently our Intranet server runs Windows Server 2003 (recently migrated from NT 4.0), bare. Nothing added. No DB Server, no separate development server, nothing. El Unico, solamente, a single, solitary server. We do not have any type of
Except for one thing, my choices are too narrow. My development experience on Windows is minimal, thus trying to put together something in C# is out of the question for this project. VBScript and JavaScript are not up to the task that is needed. The early prototype I put together taught me that much. In the past I looked for Open Source CMSs for Windows servers. Can you believe they are few and far between? Of course if I installed a real language like PHP, Perl or Python there are many CMSs that will work on Windows systems. The beaucracy makes that quite difficult.
Imagine my plesaure today when I realized I was searching for the wrong thing. Now that the Intranet Server is Windows 2003, .Net is a valid option. And what did I find?
Each has a license that is close to a BSD license. What is more interesting, each grew from the same base: Microsoft's IBuySpy (IBS) portal kit. Very intriguing. At the moment I'm installing a test server (Windows XP Pro) to evaluate each. If they work as their features claim, then now VBScript monstrosity will plague our Intranet.