Business Needs

With hundreds of employees spanning 7 states, CareSouth needed an internet accessible portal for corporate communications, manuals and easy access to corporate contacts in each department. The portal also needed to seamlessly plug into their existing Microsoft based network and leverage the pre-existing contact information in Active Directory.
Solution

DotNetNuke Community Edition was deployed into the existing corporate network along with two 3rd party modules. While the Community Edition provided a low cost entry point for the portal basis, it lacked a few important features that were critical to the success of the project. One of the shining strengths of DotNetNuke is its development community and extensibility via 3rd party modules and extensions; this allows DotNetNuke to mold into the exact fit for any business need.

Although DotNetNuke natively supports active directory authentication, one of the lacking features was the ability to query Active Directory and return contact details like phone/email/address any other custom Active Directory Fields. CareSouth needed to be able to see a list of contacts and contact information based on departments. This list needed to be updated dynamically based on Active Directory. This functionality was added by a 3rd party module created by CodeFreak -”Employee directory/User Directory” which dynamically queries the Active Directory LDAP server with predefined searches and returns them in a template format for easy viewing.

At the time of the deployment, DotNetNuke Professional was in its infancy and did not include any form of document management system. CareSouth specifically needed versioning, document indexing and some sort of granular security model. All of these features are in the current DotNetNuke Professional but at the time we needed to add an additional 3rd party module by Bring2Mind called “Document Exchange”. The Document Exchange module added critically missing functionality along with some unforeseen benefits like WebDAV authoring, extensible and template able UI for viewing documents and notification alerts when documents were changed.

In the end, CareSouth was able to quickly learn and use the DotNetNuke interface and has continued to extend it by adding pages of content. The granular security allows the burden of updating content to shift from the IT dept to each Dept and speeds the dissemination of information by allowing departmental employees to update the content directly instead of sending it to the IT dept and waiting for them to update it.