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I am a founder and principal in a not-for-profit IT consulting and web hosting company called Freeform Solutions, based in Toronto, Canada. We use XOOPS as the platform of choice for intranet and portal solutions for our clients (other not-for-profits).
So yes, I would say you can successfully use XOOPS in business environments. Unfortunately I can't give you reference URLs or screenshots since the sites we have built are private sites for our clients.
There are some challenges to using XOOPS in complex intranets though, since the default approach of the system is to simply have all users either registered or anonymous. XOOPS is ahead of many competitors in that it lets you create lots of groups to manage your users, and the modules have group-based permission structures for the most part. But the big problem with having lots of groups in XOOPS is that managing those groups and the users in them can be a challenge.
For instance, there is no automatic way for new users to be made members of specific groups in your system. You have to manually assign group membership. There is a thread discussing this and some modules for fixing it (including one we wrote) here:
https://xoops.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?forum=14&topic_id=23504Another example: if you want to give ten of your groups the ability to access your forums, you have to assign that permission individually to each group. You can't select the permission you want to assign (or remove) and then select the scope of groups to apply the permission to. I am optimistic that these sorts of improvements will come around in 2.2 or 2.4 (certainly by 3.0, right guys?!).
Fortunately, the backend of XOOPS is well enough organized that these kind of additions are not too hard to code yourself if you have decent knowledge of SQL and PHP.
One of the biggest drawbacks for potential commercial/business users of XOOPS is that it is difficut to get a handle on what modules are best for achieving what ends. Hopefully modules.xoops.org will be open soon and will solve this problem. But for now, a fair bit of patience and research is required to figure out what modules are available (and reliable) for meeting whatever need you have. I believe XOOPS could really take the business/intranet niche by storm if the marketing effort just moves up a couple notches and good promo material including module listings is made available.
--Julian