Last Saturday (June 4), I had the opportunity to speak at the very first WordCamp organized in Belgium! The event took place in the lovely city of Antwerp (the second biggest port of Europe).
Het Steen, the oldest building of Antwerp
My presentation was about one of my strongest convictions: thanks to BuddyPress, companies can enjoy WordPress to power their intranets and improve the way their employees communicate and collaborate.
During the first part of my presentation, I explained why I think Microsoft Sharepoint is leading the market in Intranet softwares based on my experience using MS products during the first few years I worked in my company. For twenty years, Microsoft has been helping us create our documents through its MS Office Suite which is still widely used in many corporations and businesses today. I’m convinced that one of the key features of any intranet is a secure file sharing system where users can set the privacy of their documents.
The second part of my talk dealt with how I’ve built a custom-made intranet solution using BuddyPress, a powerful and extensible plugin. The following table summarizes the way I addressed the most important and expected features (imho) for any Intranet software. As you will see, BuddyPress does the heavy-lifting of the features I wanted for the intranet and used other plugins to extend BuddyPress for what we needed to complete the system.
| Employees directory | Collaborative Workspaces | Document sharing | Social sharing | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BuddyPress components |
* Members * Extended Profiles |
* Groups |
* Members * Groups |
* Activity |
| Specific plugins | + BP Member Types extended |
+ bbPress + BP Groups Taxo + Workmates |
+ BuddyDrive |
+ BP Bookmarklet + BP Reactions |
I also shared how I’m hosting this intranet on the internet using the Restrict site access and the BP Restricted community plugins.
Here are the slides of my talk :
Here’s another version of the slides containing my notes.
To conclude my presentation, I mentioned that compared to paid intranet solutions, you can mold BuddyPress to build custom-made solutions for your intranets really well and help companies of any size successfully run regular, collaborative, or community intranets.
@imath Thank you for sharing how you built your company’s BuddyPress intranet as well as for the BP plugin goodies as usual 🙂
@mercime you’re very welcome. I ❤️ BuddyPress 😉
Thanks – I share your conviction!
Just thrilled that the huge potential of WP/BP in this whole area is now being seriously thought about. Slides 10/11 of the detailed presentation appear to confirm, that WP is at about < 5% of its potential in this sector – if even that. BP hasn't even been thought about! Yet!!
Other use cases such as in local government and education may also, over time, be worth exploring. Matt Mullenweg recently wrote "We now have 5-7 years of awkwardness and incredible growth to look forward to." The direction that imath has pointed to must surely now be part of that "incredible growth".
WP/BP installations that can 1) be, as per imath's presentation securely and easily used both privately internally 2) if required, be also used publicly externally, and 3) can easily be used by either a single organisation or one with multiple divisions, separate yet consistent and unified – are, I believe, on the cusp of new exciting era!
Thanks a lot for your great comment @valuser 🙂
Congrats imath! I’m impressed by the number of tools you’ve created around BuddyPress. They are all really helpful. Congrats!
Thank you Renato 🙂