Drupal Intranet - Controlling access by role, per node, per user

Recently we had the pleasure of developing a very cool intranet for a group associated with the United Nations. They desired an online space within which they can privately share articles, comments, and files with each other.

Our mission was to make a site that would:

• Not let anonymous users view any content
• Enable varying levels of viewing, adding, and editing rights across differing authenticated user roles - on a per page/node basis
• Enable different/custom menu configurations based upon user role
• Redirect users after a successful login attempt to a front page which is unique to user role

If you have never used Drupal before you may not know that the above functionality is not available out-of-the-box. However, with a little research we found some contributed modules which helped us to achieve a totally customizable intranet:

• front page
• login destination
• menu per role
• nodeaccess