I have toyed with a few ideas for setting up a support site for intranet based staff use and did do a web page on one of our servers for a while. However the appeal of the blog and the mechanisms of it are such that I think this is by far the most preferred way of publishing the information in an easy to produce way that means it is more likely to work for everyone.
IIS is the web server we have already installed on our servers. It has an important advantage over other products out there and that is Integrated Windows Authentication (previously known as NTLM). What this means is I can restrict access to the site to staff without requiring them to enter a username and password into the browser (assuming they use Internet Explorer), as IE will transmit their Windows logon information back to the web server. Since IIS is running in our domain it can verify this against their domain logon details.
WordPress is a blogging platform that is the basis of the hosted WordPress blogging service. It is an open source and completely free platform. It requires PHP and MySQL, both of which are available in Windows versions. It is also supported by Windows Live Writer, which would be a major advantage when it comes to creating blog posts.
First task is to get PHP and MySQL up and running. The main issue is that WordPress is only certified for PHP4, but the latest version of PHP is 5.2 and support for 4 will end soon. In any case, PHP4 appears to be next to impossible to make work with IIS. Surely it’s not rocket science but after a lot of fruitless effort trying to make 4.x work with IIS I gave up and tried 5.2.x which has so far worked flawlessly. The real test will be if WordPress can work with it without major issues, because of deprecations in 5.x. Next step: get MySQL up…