Organizing Intranets

The intranets (aka “offices”) area of KARL structures content along organizational lines. Each intranet/office contains its content, while some content spans the organization.

This document shows the configuration options related to intranets:

• Managing intranets
• Adding an intranet
• Changing the global “feature”
• Managing information in the cross-intranet “files” section, such as network news and events.
• Editing information in an intranet
• Adding a new forum in a particular intranet
• How to delete an intranet

Also, an audio/video "screencast" is available that demonstrates many of these administrative actions. The screencast is in QuickTime format.

Managing Intranets

All of the tasks in this document start by getting to the screen for managing intranets. This screen isn’t linked to from any existing screen. To reach this, visit the /offices/ URL for your KARL site.

This presents a UI that looks similar to a community. This is for good reason: /offices/ is a community. Furthermore, each intranet it holds, such as /offices/atlanta, is a community. This means that, in addition to the intranet-oriented UI for intranet content, there is an additional way to navigate the intranets using the community UI. Administrators use the latter to configure intranets.

1. Log in as a user in the KarlAdmin group.
2. Visit the /offices/ URL.
3. Note there are tabs for Files (content that spans intranets/offices), Forums (in case there are forums that span intranets/offices) and Intranets.
4. Click on Intranets to see the listing of all existing intranets.

Add an Intranet

Adding an intranet is straightforward:

1. Visit Intranets as described above.
2. Click Add Intranet.
3. Provide information about the intranet:

• The Title serves as the basis for the identifier in the URL. Thus, if you want a short ID and longer title, enter the short ID as the title, then edit the title later.
• The address, city, state, country, zip code, and telephone are only for display in the footer when navigating the intranets. They have no other structural or semantic purpose.
• The Navigation Menu is the HTML used in the left-hand column for that intranet. The pull-right submenus use a particular HTML structure.
• The Middle Portlets and Right Portlets control which portlets appear in which order for that intranet. Provide the path to the container that you would like to appear as a portlet (e.g. /offices/files/network-events). Only certain kinds of containers can be used as portlets.

Changing the Global Feature

The intranet layout uses three columns for the home page of an intranet: navigation in left column, cross-organizational portlets in the middle column, and office-specific portlets in the right column.

The top of the middle column shows the “feature”, which is a highlight used for all intranet home pages. This feature is nothing more than HTML that is stored on the /offices/ community’s edit screen. In general, the HTML includes images stored in /offices/files/, which is the place for content that spans each intranet/office.

1. Visit Intranets as described above.
2. Click on the OVERVIEW tab if it isn’t currently active.
3. Click the Edit action. This provides an edit form similar to editing a community.
4. In the Feature field, provide the HTML used for displaying the feature.

Managing Organizational Content

Some content, such as Network News and Network Events, is not logically part of one particular intranet/office. As such, this content is managed in the /offices/ community, above each individual intranet/office.

There are two paths to reach such content.

• Visit an intranet home page and click on the MORE link at the bottom of the portlet. This lets you list existing content, add/edit/delete content, and see an Advanced admin view of the folder.
• Visit Intranets as described above, click on the “FILES” tab, and navigate to the folder. This gives you the community UI for managing content.

Edit Intranet Configuration

To change the values of an intranet’s address, portlet configuration, etc., simply navigate to the edit screen for that intranet:

1. Visit Intranets as described above.
2. Click the Edit link for the particular intranet of interest.
3. Change the values and click submit.

Adding Forums

By policy, only KarlAdmin users can create new forums. These forums can exist at the the /offices/forums/ level and span all offices/intranets, but in general, a forum is associated with a particular office/intranet.

1. Visit Intranets as described above.
2. Click the Edit link for the intranet/office where the forum should be added.
3. Click the FORUMS tab.
4. Click the Add Forum action to create a new forum in that intranet.

Once a forum is created, it can be used as a portlet on an intranet home page. Also, you can edit the forum’s title and description by visiting the forum and clicking the Edit action.

Deleting an Intranet

OSI considered deleting a community to be an unsupported operation in KARL1 and KARL2. That is, the “correct” way should be to mark the community as inactive, rather than lose all the information. This “correct” way remains in discussion, and thus, deleting was not really supported.

In KARL3, deleting is a fully-supported operation. However, to retain the “you shouldn’t be doing this” policy, there is no link in the UI to delete a community. Since each intranet is nothing more than a community, the policy applies to intranets as well.

To delete an intranet:

1. Visit the “delete” URL for the intranet, such as /offices/atlanta/delete.html.
2. Click on the ok button.

After the click, the intranet and all its content are deleted.