Software for a social network in a corporate intranet running on LAMP

Question

The company where I work for (1800+ Employees) is looking to enhance the personal relationships between its employees, allow a better collaboration and communication between departments and make it easier for the HR department to identify skills, experience and interests among the personnel (ex: we have some colleagues with deep knowledge of SAP modules and products, but during concrete projects it results very difficult to identify them and integrate them). Therefore, they want to implement a social network for our intranet.

We are just looking for the basic features such as profiles, discussion boards and so on, so nothing fancy. I proposed Community Server but my boss said .Net and java are no-gos. He wants LAMP and is not interested in a web solution like Ning, because of privacy and security concerns. It does not matter if it is Open-Source or commercial software. But it should allow a complete layout customization and must also have access from the outside world.

So my question would be, is there something like Community Server running on a LAMP stack?

Thank you very much!

UPDATE: We already have a Facebook page and a group. But my boss wants some features not included in Facebook such as a tag cloud in each profile page displaying skills and relevant proyects; and a feature like the "neighborhoods" from Last.FM, where you can group people with similar skills and interests and there is also the confidentialy issue (discussions about projects, clients, etc). So, any ideas?

Answer 1

It doesn't directly answer your question, but aren't you rather trying to reinvent the wheel?

Facebook has got Social Networking down and the likely hood is 95% of your 1800 employees already use it.

Why would you go to the effort of writing and supporting a product as well as asking your employees to update information about themselves in multiple places when you could just set up a Facebook Network.

The other point I would make is, why are you limiting yourself to one way of doing things right from the off. Perhaps a detailed analysis of which technologies best serve your purpose would be more appropriate.

I appreciate this doesn't answer you question, I just feel this is a good example of Corporations unwilling to embrace tools already out there, I suspect because they are scared of them.

I'm probably right in guess that you're company heavily monitors Facebook usage, which is why this also might be hard.

Answer 2

Some sort of facebook application would allow you to keep the data on a server that you manage, but still use facebook's existing features. Pretty certain that facebook uses PHP for its application framework.

Answer 3

I agree with MrEdmundo and would upvote him if I were registered. Dont fall victim to "It wasnt invented here" syndrome. I bet your boss is like "we need something like facebook".

If it makes you feel better... here is a little story:

I was trying to implement some sort of group chat so fellow employees could ask quick questions to eachother online without having to get up or if someone was on the phone, etc. However, the service I installed (some sort of jabber daemon, i forget which one) never really got used. The solution? Just install the facebook chat client because all the co-workers are already on facebook most the day anyways!

plus, the "screen name" is appropriate because it is our real names, not stuff like "Out Into Space", "theman", or "fly-mystikal-dj-69"

Answer 4

You might want to consider something like Drupal. It's technically a CMS, but it's extremely customizable, and there are a lot of modules available that provide social-networking-style features.

Answer 5

Use Office Messenger for communication. It's basically like MSN Messenger but run on the company's servers so they can monitor all traffic. To know who has expertise in what area, it can't be too hard to build your own simple CRUD application to record profiles of employees and have each profile tagged with key skills, that the employee has and build a search function to find the people with the skills you need at any given time.

Answer 6

You can create an application using the Facebook SDK (PHP, java or any other language) and moderate it so that only employees can use it. That way you can use the existing Facebook features and add the tag clouds and other stuff your boss wants.

Answer 7

I've not used it, but Dolphin might be worth downloading to try out.

Answer 8

elgg.org

LAMP easy to install and setup, looks like your requirements would all be easily satisfied by the official plugins that are available.

Answer 9

Try Open Atrium, a Drupal-based team server.