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Two employees ask an AI assistant the same question. One can reach five intranet pages, the other three, because two are locked.
Nearly every intranet vendor now sells an AI feature. Most demos look the same: type a question, get a confident answer. What the demo rarely shows is how the AI decides what it is allowed to tell you.
That question matters more on an intranet than almost anywhere else. An intranet holds HR policies, leadership updates, budget notes and drafts that only some people should see. An assistant that answers from all of it, for everyone, is a data leak with a friendly interface.
This guide explains what an AI intranet is, where permissions go wrong, and the questions to ask any vendor (including us) before you buy.
Concrete CMS 9.5.5 is out, and it's a patch release with more in it than the version number suggests. Our October town hall also had four new add-ons, a museum website worth a look, and a forum thread about letting an AI agent do your most tedious Concrete chores.
October 6, 2026: PortlandLabs, the company behind Concrete CMS, the open source content management system built for teams and complex websites, announced today that Concrete CMS has been awarded the Fall 2026 Leader Award by SourceForge. SourceForge is the world's largest B2B software review and comparison website, with nearly 20 million in-market B2B software buyers per month. The award recognizes companies and products with a high volume of recent, excellent user reviews that place them in the top fifth percentile of highly reviewed products on SourceForge.
Andy's in a tent somewhere and Myq is traveling through Southeast Asia, so this month's town hall is a lean one. No core release, but Franz September will bring one. Expect security fixes and smaller improvements rather than big new features, largely driven by what he called the whirlwind of agentic AI security testing hitting open source projects right now. In the meantime there's a strong batch of new marketplace add-ons and a new Swiss partner worth introducing.
One of the hardest problems in building an AI assistant for a website or intranet isn't the AI part. It's the permissions part. How does the AI know what a specific employee is allowed to see? How do you prevent it from surfacing a confidential HR document to someone who has no business reading it? How do you keep AI responses in sync with content that changes constantly?
Manufacturing companies need two completely different types of websites, and most CMS conversations treat them like they're the same problem. One is internal: employees, HR, company news, policies, the kind of information that keeps a distributed workforce aligned. The other is external: product specifications, dealer resources, pricing, the technical documentation that helps a builder in Georgia spec the right engineered lumber or a purchasing manager decide between two suppliers.
If your organization used Workplace by Meta, the clock has run out. Meta shut down new content posting on September 1, 2025, and moved all accounts to read-only mode. On June 1, 2026, all Workplace accounts are permanently deleted: data, history, groups, and all. If you haven't already migrated, you are out of time for a careful transition and into damage control territory.
No release this month the team has been heads-down on some bigger projects and will be back with updates soon. Here's everything else.
PortlandLabs is proud to be a winner of the Leader award from SourceForge, the world's largest software reviews and comparison website.
Every intranet has a graveyard. It's the section no one visits, full of pages that were accurate in 2021, linked to a tool that no longer exists, and last updated by someone who left the company eighteen months ago. Most organizations know it's there. Almost none have a reliable process for finding it before an employee does.