I have been working furiously over the last couple of weeks to get a new extranet online for IPREX, the international group of public relations and communications firms my company belongs to.
The mission was to see if we could get an extranet built in under a month, at very low cost, with some highly specific functions. Using pre-existing online web tools was theonly way we could have accomplished these goals.
Some of the tools we ended up using:
Ning: Provided the back-end framework. I initially went with SquareSpace, which is much more customizable than Ning and is what we are now using for our public-facing site, but it did not have enough built in community functionality to make things work the way we wanted as fast as we wanted. The recent addition of Ning Apps made adding our Huddle sites far easier. However, Ning's lack of integrated document management is making implementing a document library FAR more difficult than it should be (Ning provides 20GB of space and an image and video library, but nothing for documents outside of adding 3rd party apps, or attaching documents to individual notes.). I may revisit SquareSpace for version 2.0 of the site though - It’s a great environment for rapid development.
Huddle: This was our pre-existing site used for permissions-controlled document storage and discussions. It can be integrated into Ning via the Ning Apps extensions. Huddle is a very powerful tool and the permissions settings are critical for some of our needs - however I am fearful that it will be too complex for some IPREX professional to want to use on a regular basis. I am looking for a simpler solution for everyday use and whant to stick with Huddle only for the things that require it (various committee, project, and executive document libraries, etc.). If Ning just had an integrated document library, I would be a happy (and far less sleep-deprived) guy!
Google Docs: Used for a minimal-permissions set of documents that benefit from greater ease of use for end-users. It's my current, less-than-perfect, interim documents "semi-solution". The ease of sharing documents in folders is heavily countered by the fact that shared folders can still only have documents and other folders created in them by users with full permissions on the Google Docs workspace (and that’s a separate login from Ning, making it FAR less than ideal.)
Google Spreadsheets: Google spreadsheets, and their integrated forms tool, was a life-saver. We had a requirement to have users input data in for Awards (and other data types). That data then needed to automatically populate a database and the most recent five entries needed to be displayed on the home dashboard. I created a Google spreadsheet form to handle data input and linked to the form from a Ning tab (I could have also embedded it on a Ning page). It made a really elegant database solution...for free! I figured I'd then populate the last five entries on the Ning page via an RSS widget. That lead me to the most frustrating 8-10 hours of work I have had in a long time. Google provides a really easy way to publish spreadsheet data to an RSS feed. Unfortunately, the feed it produces is a completely malformed bunch of crap that is unusable by any RSS widget or feed reader on the planet (at least with my data). Nothing could make it work right…no matter what I tried…until I finally used…Yahoo Pipes.
Yahoo! Pipes: Thank god for Pipes!!! By switching Google Spreadsheets to publish the data as a CSV feed (Nice job on the multiple formats Google. At least you provided away to work around the crap RSS feed), I could then get properly formatted CSV data into Pipes and use the magic of Pipes scripting to output a useable RSS feed. Pipes is a godsend and Yahoo! Should be thanked for it daily. Thanks Yahoo!!
WidgetBox: I needed some custom tabbed RSS widgets, and WidgetBox, as per usual, made quick work of the task, an inexpensive pro-account gets rid of all the ads and produces rock solid widgets. I must also compliment Ning here again. They make Widget embedding really easy. Thanks Ning! (WidgetBox also works really well in Facebook, MySpace, etc. too. Thanks WidgetBox!)
TwitterTracker: A great embeddable app, that began life as a Wordpress plug-in (I breifly concidered trying to do the whole site in Wordpress...I seriously think it could be done...but a challenge like that is not made for a time-line like ours) that we are using for tracking twitter mentions on-site. It highly customizable and works well in a group setting like ours
NewsShare: A great way to share interesting websites with our members. It even allows ongoing commenting. It's built by SlinkSet on top of Posterous...so ya know it's cool!
Google Calendar: We are using the Ning events system to allow individual users to set up events, but we also needed a global IPREX calendar of events. Google calendar provided an very good solution, with an embedded widget providing up-to-date info on global events to our members. A belated thanks Google!

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