A particular type of development I've seen from businesses using Joomla is monitoring systems for staff or customers. In highly-specialised industries, management may have a need to monitor processes or attendance. 

Examples

Class attendance: One recent project involved the creation of an attendance system for a hospitality industry training program. Units and resources were already set up using a commercial extension with some custom modifications. Staff and students already had user accounts with the application, and it made sense to create an attendance component to the system which integrated with the learning management system, and to raise alerts when attendance reached certain thresholds. The reliability of this system was critical, as students' funding could be affected by their attendance levels. Logging of all system updates was added to ensure that all record changes could be fully traced back during scrutineering. 

Intranet: When Joomla is used as an intranet platform, what companies often require is that they are able to confirm that messages are getting in front of the eyes of all of the staff members who need to see it. If there is a change of policy or events that will affect your staff or partners, then it's often advantageous to have a mechanism by which users can confirm (and accept) the content. Added to this, a monitoring interface for managers can provide a snapshot view of people who have not received key messages and need to be chased up.

These kinds of solutions often implement:

• Joomla's UAC, providing granular access to resources based on your organisational hierarchy
• Integration with alternative input devices, such as barcode scanners, for easy attendance verification using existing student ID cards
• Email or SMS alerts ensuring that people are kept informed as changes are made regardless of whether they log in to the system
• Plugins allowing easy interaction with the system inside content items
• Modules to display outstanding tasks and action required
• User control panels allowing users access to their full data record so that issues can be addressed
• Administrator interfaces providing snapshot views in a user-friendly way
• Exportable reports for debrief in meetings

If you have a requirement for any kind of user monitoring, validation or attendance system, then contact Andy to start a discussion