2nd MySQL database or IIS?

By Dubber Dan on 21 Nov 2005 at 16:03 UTC

I've been looking for a solution for our company internal intranet solution and think Drupal is the one. What we're wanting to do is:

* Central file storage of protocols/procedures
* Internal/external contacts
* Holiday calendar
* Staff In/Out board
* Noticeboard
* Web links
* Access restricted by user level (possible to link to Active Directory Policies?)
* Ability to alert users to new uploads to the Intranet

Our network environment is we have a couple of Win 2K3 servers and an old NT4 server and all users use 2K or XP pc's, some connecting via TS at 2 branch sites. We have Office 2000/XP/2K3 and IE5/6 for all users.

The server I'm planning on installing Drupal on is one of the 2K3 boxes but I want to check something before I go ahead. That server is running an app that has MySQL behind it but I don't know much about MySQL so don't want to do anything that might jeodardise the existing app. Would I be better of installing Drupal over IIS and keeping the 2 things seperated or would it be safe to have them both using MySQL? Perhaps it's possible to have 2 instances of MySQL running on the one server?

Comments

For your MySQL question, use

eferraiuolo commented 21 November 2005 at 16:15

For your MySQL question, use on instence of the server, but just have two DBs, one for the existing app and one for drupal.

As for the things you want drupal to do (espicailly recongizing AD policies) be prepared to write some code.

You want want to invest some time in looking at ECMs (Enterprise Content Managments systems) that use .NET specicially ASP.NET which inheritly link to AD.

If your using exchange server its going to be eaiser to link into a .NET web app for the holiday/caliendar, and contacts.

Either way your looking at coding, expect the project to take a year, espeically in a big company, but if you start with a .NET web app or web framework I would say you will have to do less coding that to make drupal conform to your requirements. Its hard enough to just get drupal to run on IIS and MySQL on a Win 2k3 server.

What other solutions were you looking at, and why do you feel drupal is the one for this project?

The linking into AD was only

Dubber Dan commented 21 November 2005 at 16:39

The linking into AD was only an after thought of mine to be able to set user access level and to mean users don't have one more login. We are running Exchange, but only v5.5 on an old NT4 box - with no hope of it being replaced anytime soon.

So putting the linking with AD aside, which bits in my list would require coding to be able to work?

that's unfortunate

sepeck commented 22 November 2005 at 02:04

as sticking with Exchange 5.5 will leave your company vulnerable when support is officially discontinued at the end of the year and there are some really neat vbscripts that could pull data from the Exchnge 5.5 server to accomplish this.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

That sounds more like a job

scroogie commented 21 November 2005 at 19:17

That sounds more like a job for PHProjekt. (http://www.phprojekt.com/features.php)

Dubber Dan you should look

eferraiuolo commented 21 November 2005 at 23:31

Dubber Dan you should look at this, good call scroogie it seems to fit most of his requirements.

doable

moshe weitzman commented 21 November 2005 at 19:43

i've implemented most of that in my company intranet. see webserver_auth,module for AD integration. I wrote some vbscript scripts that hit exchange server to do the free/busy stuff.

scroogie/eferraiuolo - there

Dubber Dan commented 22 November 2005 at 10:26

scroogie/eferraiuolo - there was me thinking I'd narrowed my selection down and you now give me another option all together!! I do like the look/feel/functionality of Drupal but will gicve PHProjekt a look

moshe - that webserver module looks interesting. Does that mean that users don't need to log in seperately to the intranet - they are logged in with permissions when logged in to a pc? If so then that might be my answer

webserver_auth and LDAP

sepeck commented 22 November 2005 at 17:08

webserver_auth and LDAP modules are two appraoches to integrating authentication with an external source, in your case Active Directory. There are bits and pieces of how to do this in the forums.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Sold!!

Dubber Dan commented 22 November 2005 at 21:17

Ok sepeck, you've sold it to me. I reckon I'm gonna give it a go and get a site up and running to see if I can get it to do what I want ;-)

I wish I had time to play

sepeck commented 22 November 2005 at 22:09

I wish I had time to play with it myself and get a solid 'how to' document on this. In many businesses if you are not completly locked into a MS only solution (SharePoint[$$] or SharePoint Services) then Drupal can be a phenomally powerful platform to build your Internet site on.

When you get this working please consider adding a handbook page on it to the handbook.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}