A corporate website or portal is actually a masthead for every company. Creating a site of this type will help establish the work process and communication within the team, facilitate the work of the HR department and other departments, and, of course, allow the sales department to interact with clients in a better way.

Let’s briefly dwell on each solution that can be applied to portals.

Commercial:

• MS SharePoint. Developed since 2003 and owned by Microsoft. The idea is based on the interaction of several users with one object, so the platform is well suited for companies with offices located in different places. By implementing such a portal, the firm can organize joint work of employees regardless of time and place. In fact, MS SharePoint is a constructor that allows creating a portal site with any set of pages, forming lists and libraries, organizing information retrieval and, of course, automating business processes. The possibility of integrating portals with external systems is also present. The modern version of MS SharePoint allows managing work processes, effectively organize workgroup interaction, set tasks and look for performers. Stable operation is another plus of this platform.
• 1C-Bitrix: A Corporate Portal. A domestic development that is a boxed intranet, which allows you to combine the capabilities of a social network and group work in a single solution. On a single site, employees can find out company news, browse lists of employees and their managers, and communicate via an embedded chat. In addition, Bitrix is a single repository for corporate documents and contacts necessary for work, a platform for online meetings, and even a website and online store builder. Such a portal will help to automate all business processes, take into account working time, maintain end-to-end analytics, and generate documents and reports. There is a handy mobile application. According to official data, such large companies as Vnesheconombank, Rosneft, Samsung and even the government of Mexico use the service.

If we talk about open platforms for portals based on free CMS, now there are almost no such solutions. A few years ago, JomPortal from Joomla!, Jboss EPP from WildFly (formerly JBoss AS) were in fashion, but for several years their development is actually not carried out.

Of those free options, with the help of which a corporate portal of the company can be created, experts single out CMS WordPress. This platform is free, easy enough to use and can suit small companies with limited budgets. However, the cons outweigh the pros.

The basic features of the WordPress platform are not quite suitable for a modern new portal, and if a company needs, for example, to ensure the communication of employees, they will have to install an additional forum plugin based on WordPress, or even a separate forum framework. The same applies to the storage of corporate documents or, for example, training materials in video format. In other words, you have to look for workarounds to get the features you need.

The same goes for the once popular Drupal platform. The latest versions, on which you can create a corporate portal, contain bugs and imperfect programming code, and the earlier ones – do not support modern versions of PHP.

To sum it up: if you have to choose between the commercial box solutions for portals and open-source platforms, we recommend the first option. Free products do not require a budget, but they are not sufficiently protected from the outside penetration, can work unstably and do not have sufficient functionality.