If you browse the Sitefinity showcase gallery, you will see awesome examples of how our customers use Sitefinity to power their public websites. That might leave you with the impression that Sitefinity is best suited just for public websites, but that’s only part of the story. There are also many organizations that use Sitefinity for their intranet and internal portals, but it is unfortunate that those projects cannot be accessed and showcased publicly.
In this and follow up blog posts I will provide you with more insight on what makes Sitefinity a great platform for intranets, internal team collaboration portals, business process automation and optimization.
Let’s first address the software licensing question at present and then in follow up blog posts we will look into a real life case of an internal portal for the business team of an organization.
Sitefinity is licensed per domain name and allows for unlimited sub-domains and unlimited web servers. Therefore, you can get even more value out of Sitefinity by using the same domain based license of the software to power both your public website (e.g. sitefinity.com) and your intranet portal (e.g. intranet.sitefinity.com). Those two sites can be different Sitefinity instances and even deployed on different servers with the same software license. For more insight on licensing you can refer to a related post Making the most out of your Sitefinity CMS license file.
In case your intranet needs to have its own root domain name (e.g. http://intranet) and requires a higher Sitefinity edition (e.g. more concurrent CMS editors), then you should obtain a Sitefinity license for the respective intranet domain.
In the next blog post we will look into some of the requirements that an intranet for a business team may have.
In the meantime it would be great if you can share with us whether you already use Sitefinity for internal portals. Why and why not? Any favorite features or must have requirements?