I'll try to make this as simple as possible.

We were given the task of building an Intranet portal for our department and we had already started development using VS2003, building pages from scratch.

Someone suggested that we used a CMS instead and, since we are a .NET shop, DotNetNuke was the obvious choice (although I did look at others like Drupal).

Now, this is the first time I research these alternatives and they look quite promising. However, I am not sure how much custom functionality can be added to them and if we could plug in our code to these pages.

The following are some of the things that we need to implement in our portal. Could you please advise as to whether this can be easily achieved? Keep in mind we are on ASP.NET 1.1 and developing using VS2003.

We need to create forms that will have custom fields, some of which will need to be populated from a database, some by code, etc. These fields could also be related. For example, depending on the value selected in certain drop-down list, the following text field will be enabled or disabled.

Some of the forms will have more complex controls, like data grids. We might also need to create controls by code, based on data retrieved from a database.

The content of these forms will be sent in custom e-mails to users/addresses that also come from a database. They will also be used to fill out bookmarks in a Word document using COM, which will be e-mailed as well.

So what do you think? Is DotNetNuke for us?

Yes (as everybody will not have access to everything... explained in more detail below), yes (as we might include department and/or company news, regulations, holidays, etc.), yes (as we want to include department member holidays, project timelines, etc.) and yes (as we might want to have a unique repository for staff findings, experiences and suggestions).

Thanks a lot, Colt! This all sounds very nice, however, here's what the main functionality of our portal will be. I will be more specific, as we still have not determined whether a CMS is the way for us to go.

We need to automate processes that we have to do manually today, like requesting database configuration changes or access from our DBA's.

The idea was to create a form where you specify server, database, backup file location (if necessary), availability and expiration dates, project name, client name, access needed, purpose, general comments, etc. This form, once submitted, would create a Word document our DBA's currently receive and mail it to them.

Once the DBA's receive this notification, they could log on to the portal, see the requests they have and fulfill them or reject them, also adding information to the request, like completion date, reasons for non-completion, new database name, etc.

We want to log all this activity in a database and keep an inventory of active databases and an inventory of who has access to what, all based on what has been requested through these forms. This inventory would then be used to, among other tasks, launch a "roll call" to everybody that has any type of access to an active database for them to confirm whether the access and/or database is still needed or can be dropped.

Etcetera. I'm sure you get the idea. We were planning to implement other functionalities, but they pretty much follow the same pattern explained above.

Obviously, this is not something I will be able to download anywhere, as it is very specific. My main concern was whether plugging something custom like this (.NET code, backend database, etc.) into DNN would be something easy to do.

Thanks again.

There are a number of modules (enterprise forms, xmod, ...), which you can use to "configure" form-based applications (including email notification) like the one your talking about. You don't even need to develop these things from scratch.

Peter

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Peter Schotman
Cestus Websites voor DotNetNuke oplossingen in Nederland
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