Which software for intranet CMS - Django or Joomla?
Django isn't a CMS. If you want to build an application then you'd use Django (by the sound of your post you understand that though). If you just want to be able to edit/store content and have permissions for your users - a CMS would be the way to go. I really don't know anything about Joomla though. It should be easy enough to mock up a hack to do whatever authentication you need - even if that's just a POST directly to the server.
Django will take a long time to get up to the point where you're using it for the purposes you mention. The admin interface will need to be used (or you're building a CMS from scratch) - which means creating models to model the content you already own. Then you have to customise each model page, and 'plug in' whatever authentication system you want.
Lot of work.
In my company we are thinking of moving from wiki style
intranet to a more bespoke CMS solution. Natural choice
would be Joomla, but we have a specific architecture. There
is a few hundred people who will use the system. System
should be self explainable (easier than wiki).
We use a lot of tools web, applications and integrated
within 3rd party software. The superior element which is a
glue for all of them is API. In example for the intranet
tools we do use Django, but it's used without ORM, kind of
limited to templates and url - every application has an
adequate methods within our API. We do not use the Django
admin interface, because it is hardly dependent on ORM.
Because of that Joomla may be hard to integrate. Every
employee should be able to edit most of the pages,
authentication and privileges have to be managed by our API.
How hard is it to plug Joomla to use a different
authentication process? (extension only - no hacks)
If one knows Django better than Joomla, should Django be
used?