Background:

A company I worked for had a new Internet (external) web site built.

Problem:

We already had a working Intranet (internal) site, but my company wanted to make the Intranet (internal) site to have a similar look and feel of the Internet (external) site.  They also wanted it to be more database driven so regular users could update the site without using Microsoft FrontPage (the way it was updated at the time).

Solution:

I was to create a new Intranet (internal) web site to have a similar look and feel of the external site.  I also needed to bring over a few existing tools from the existing Intranet site and make it easier to update.

Result:

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3  

I created a new Intranet site that looked very similar to the new Internet (external) site.  The site was created using Visual Studio 2005 and is almost completely database driven.  This way routine updates can be made either from within the site itself or by modifying data in the database.  Fig. 2 shows the "People Finder" employee lookup.  You can search by name, department, or office location.  Fig. 3 shows the training area.  This is a place where videos, documents, etc can be placed.  Originally I created the "tree" to pull from a database.  Shortly after publishing the site, I was hammered with stuff to add to the training section, so I changed it to pull from a folder on the web server.  So if you needed to add a item you could use Windows Explorer, browse out to that folder, and paste the file.  Every time the page loads, it looks to that folder and re-creates the tree.  This works great for the capacity that we are using it.  Article items (shown in the tan and blue boxes in Fig. 1) can be added/modified from within the web application.