Having an internal networking system (intranet) is a great tool to boost internal collaboration between employees. But as many company realizes, these systems cost a dime to implement. Thus it is only limited to big companies with IT budget reaching 7 figures.

Well, there is a good way to acheive the same result withut costing your arms and legs. Open-source Content Management Systems, or open-source CMS for short, is a powerful tool that can act as a collaboration platform for your company’s need.

And we highly recommend companies, especially those small to medium SMEs with offices geographically scattered, to implement one.

Here’s why CMS is an all-around solutions for your company:

1. You can have it as your official website. You can easily update the content of your website without any programming knowledge. You can even alter a whole lot of features for your website, like page structure or navigational menu. These actions are no longer limited to web developer- now you can have the power in your hands.
2. It can function as a membership-based website, with different Access Control Level (ACL). With this membership features, you can set the access level and privileges your registered user can have. Hide sections and pages according to your user- different level of employees, vendors, customers etc..
3. It can perform as a dynamic communication channel. Forum scripts, for example, is a great way to encourage internal discussions which can include image and files attachment. Therefore related documents can always be downloaded where the action happening.
4. It has member profile system, where each user can have their own page where information about them can be displayed. Turn these pages into your employees details page, where when combined with the search function, it is a powerful employee directory for internal use.
5. It can be cheap. There’s so many open-source CMS available today that gives more and more ability for smaller companies to leverage this powerful tool. We’ll cover some of the best in future postings, but overall, these open-source CMS is a viable alternative for companies to implement their internal networking capability without the 7-digit budget.

The only drawback of using this cheaper alternative for internal networking is you have to host the system on the world wide web, exposing your system to

1. bigger security threat
2. capped bandwith usage
3. volatility of your ISP’s internet connection

But it’s still a useful system for SMEs that can be achieve using tremendously lesser budget. How low is low you might ask…Well, if you have an IT exec who knows some bits of web development, you can have your own all-rounder intranet system for free! That is if you don’t mind the bland default look of course