Installation of your starter ICommander Intranet by ICommander Support Staff
will include two functions that we have found very useful at ICommander
Corporation and will likely also be useful to you.
The first is a shared Event Calendar. ICommander Support Staff will work with you to customize the configuration of the Event Calendar for you. This includes defining what events you wish to track, colors, titles, etc. The Event Calendar is a free Perl Program or Script licensed under the GNU General Public License of the Free Software Foundation. ICommander Corporation has made a few minor changes to it but it is essentially as provided by its developer.
The basic Event Calendar lets any user add, change, or delete Event Entries. The developer of the Event Calendar has a number of very inexpensive add-on's that are available from his website (most are $5 each). One of those is an Administrative Security add-on that will allow restricting which users are allowed to edit Event Entries. The Event Calendar is quite flexible and multiple calendar databases may be setup, if you need different calendars for various purposes.
The second function we install is an In-Out Board. As with the Event Calendar, this is a free Perl Program or Script licensed under the GNU General Public License. ICommander Corporation has made a number of changes relating to format, readability, and logging but the essential functions are as downloaded from the developer's website.
If you elect to implement use of the In-Out Board, ICommander Support Staff will show you how ICommander File Manager may be used to easily add your staff members to the datafile used by the In-Out Board. You may also want to consider activating an extension to the basic In-Out Board that we use at ICommander Corporation. We modified the Perl Program so that it logs every change made to the In-Out Board as staff members make entries. Activating use of this log involves having ICommander Support Staff install an automatic Linux weekly routine that will save the logfile in a dated directory and start a new one.
This routine will also automatically read through the logfile and create two reports. One is a list of all entries for the week in the order in which they were entered. The second report is sorted by staff member. This can be very useful when reviewing timesheets for the most recent week. We place these reports in a public shared area so any staff member may review but they can be routed to any directory which makes sense for your use of the reports.
Since the logfiles are saved, it is also possible to access them for any prior week to create the same type of report when needed.
There are hundreds of free Perl and other programs or scripts available on the Internet for download and use on a web server. The two we routinely install are ones we believe will be useful to about any organization. If there are other functions you would like to implement, we can assist with locating the applicable programs and with installing. Most such programs are fairly simple to use once installed but installation often presumes significant knowledge of the Linux operating system commands and the functioning and structure of your Apache Web Server.
If you wish to explore what is available on your own, the starter Intranet Links
Page has links under 5500-web_server_development and 6000-open_source_software
categories that will take you to websites that accumulate the various free
programs available under the GNU General Public License.