Intranet How?

Hi, I'm working for a company and they want me to design an intranet. I'm quite competent at creating websites and am eager to learn how to create 'dynamic' websites. What software would I use?

I use dreamweaver at home, could I use this and read up about asp.net to create database functionality to create a people search for employees etc...

We use a windows server that does not support PHP or MySQL i think.

Any suggestions?

Almost all servers can run mysql and php. PHP has a larger community than asp but they both do effectively the same thing. Just pick up a book on one of them and start learning.

There are plenty of tutorials and free applications to help give your site functionality. Its just a case of making a list of the things you need, then googling and reading your way to creating them.

Apart from a web server you don't really need any other specialist software to create what you are after.

As far as the internet goes, just set up a network computer with a relevant name and set all the browsers homepages to it.

Yeah ... you can install PHP and MySQL on any server ... and they're free

But ... you can use .NET to create your website with no problem. You can use DW as well or if you can grab Visual Studio .NET.

thanks for the help guys,

so as I'm quite used to dreamweaver right now, I could start making the intranet with that and then is it just a case of inputting php/mysql/asp.net code into all the pages?

yes, when you create a new document you can choose dynamic page and select what you want.

Just remember that an Intranet is simply a website on an internal server. It still has all the same principles as an internet site.

yeah, sometime i think its going to be pretty simple but the only thing Im having a bit of trouble researching is how to make a searchable people directory of all employees (approx 200 staff)

is this where the asp comes in?

and will it look presentable?

It will look as presentable as you make it, remember that as the designer you can change the look of anything.

For this you would need a data base of employees, you can then use ASP to call this information from the database. Once you have this information you can style it with HTML and CSS.

Yep. I would recommend hand coding though. Stick to that code panel in dreamwever...you learn more and output better and cleaner code that is more accessible.