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Clients
Projects revolve around clients, and various aspects of client communication can be planned and recorded. Most basically it's a database of client contact details, but you can also log any telephone calls for review at a later date.

Reports
IOS makes an excellent job of collating the information entered about clients, time management and projects, and presents that information in concise reports. Work logs for presentation to the client, hourly time sheets and details of current projects can all be easily printed or downloaded.

An automatically generated project report, looking good enough to show the client.

Document Repository
This is a fantastic feature, that allows for simple document sharing between users. For each project, files can be uploaded and shared between members of the team, and archived for later retrieval. The main advantage of this system over regular file sharing across a LAN is to be able to access the files globally (or between company offices) via the Internet. You don't, however, have the advanced security options that Windows file sharing provides.

News
A useful utility to display news and news feeds, with the latest headlines appearing on the front page. However, administration requires the 'News Admin Pak', costing $19.99 at the time of writing.

That's just a range of IOS's range of features, and there are many more, including a forum system and a survey manager for fielding employees' opinions. A complete list of features can be found at http://www.diggersolutions.com/features_ios.asp. To make full use of the system, however, several of the 'optional add-ons' become pretty much essential, and you can choose between buying the full set, or only the "Admin Paks" of those components you require.

Customization

If you wish to change the way IOS works by adding new features, modifying the system's look and feel etc, then you won't have a tough time. All of the source code is neat and well commented, winning Digger a "Superior Code Award" from Planet Source Code in 2002. Submissions of modifications written by the users of IOS are encouraged, and can be posted to the developer's forum for other users to share.

IOS is excellent as a starting point for developing an intranet, as well as an end product. The commercially available "Skinned" modification shows how much can be done, and clearly both the aesthetics and operation could be modified to suit your Intranet requirements.

Conclusions

Intranet Open Source is geared towards businesses with project-based work, a Web site design company, for example, and it really handles all aspects of communication that would be required: file sharing; time management; storage of client details, etc. To be fully useable, it's almost essential to purchase the add-ons — still considerably cheaper than the leading commercial intranet software. Alternatively, if you have someone available with ASP knowledge, replacements for the missing parts could be put together.

The code behind the system is well written and simple to modify, and while bugs can be found (such as the lack of form validation mentioned earlier), these will likely be dealt with quickly due to the open-source nature of the system.

If you're looking for a free-of-charge intranet tool that allows complete management of your clients, time and projects, then this is an ideal solution. If you see your intranet purely as a tool for sharing information, then it's worth looking back at more generic systems such as PHP-Nuke, designed to handle large quantities of information without specific reference to clients or project-oriented businesses.

Next month I'll be looking at a final open-source system, to help you decide if they're the right way to go for your Intranet. Until then!