My company is in need of an intranet & content management system. Nothing too fancy at the moment, just something capable of sharing information and providing an online document repository that can be accessed over the web. Most of our team (10-15 users) are permenantly off-site or travelling.

Any suggestions? I know of Sharepoint but have no practical experience with it, is it pricey? We've already got available servers and in-house technical people to manage it, but I don't want to give them a big job so something out-of-the-box would be great.

Cheers.

don't use vignette.

we run TikiWiki, haven't tried any others but it seems okay.

* Wikis (like in Wikipedia)
* Forums (like in phpBB)
* Blogs (like in WordPress)
* Articles (like in Yahoo News)
* Image Gallery (like in Flickr)
* Map Server (like in Google Maps)
* Link Directory (like in DMOZ)
* Multilingual (like in Babel Fish)
* Bug Tracker (like in Bugzilla)
* RSS Feeds (like in Digg)
* Free Open Source software (LGPL)

Have a look at google apps (google sites) – basic but 100% free and fine for a basic setup.

Hope this helps.

We use sharepoint, speaking to the admin's, it lack of integration with other MS product is scary – you'd 'assume' it would all work together
(I forget the details, as the admin just started boring me with there rants about it)
You need MS Pro office to administer it (license wise, not for any specific product), and sharepoint CAL for everyone who want to use it, Just seems to be a way for MS to suck the life blood out of your business.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101655351033.aspx

No idea if there is anything better out there though.

We've found sharepoint pretty good actually. Not sure about the alternatives tho.

I'm sure I'll get no end of ribbing at work if anyone reads this (as I'm probably our company's most vociferous nay sayer) but SharePoint is pretty good if you stick to keeping it simple and small. Don't try and permanently store large numbers of documents in there – use it as a method of collaborating on them.

Also have a look at a free tool called OpenAtrium (http://openatrium.com/). It really is very interesting and is built on Drupal which is rapidly becoming a star in the web content management business. Seems to be good enough for whitehouse.gov ubuntu.com and ozzy.com, anyway…

I'm not an IT pro, but I have spent a lot of time over the last couple of years looking at content management systems for our business. I've learnt a lot, some of it the hard way, but I'm happy to admit I'm a bumbling but interested amateur.
I've only really looked at the free stuff. Others will tell you about Sharepoint et al – you hear its a 'mare to set up, but most probably will work fine so long as you do it the MS way – same as all their products.
First thing I think you should consider is whether the Document management or Content management aspects of the site are more important. Content Management Systems are only good at handling content created for them and within them. If version control and inline editing of created word etc files are important then you probably need to look at a document management system like Alfresco or Knowledge Tree. If its more of news, blogs, forums, with read only access to files then CMSs like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are more likely to fit the bill. My experience is that the CMS's are easier to setup. (But that's probably because the others are java based and I can never come to grips with Tomcat).
I like Drupal. This site is WordPress (I think). Bitmani has downloadable virtual machines with some of these pre installed, so you can try them out to get a flavour of what's possible.
EDIT – I've just seen ATG's post above – Open Atrium does look nice, but I still can't get my version to look as good as their demo video. :-((
Colin

Or get one built bespoke… I know a good company that can do it 😉

At my workplace we use Stellent – which is a product bought by Oracle to replace their CMS product. However, its not cheap.

Of the other opensource products, they seem to require a good knowledge of PHP scripting. Drupal doesn't look as strong in the document management area as Joomla. You may also want to include Mambo into your consideration which uses plug-ins for document management.

Thanks Gurus. Content is a nice-to-have but not as important as the document management, so I'll check out Knowledge Tree, Alfresco & Joomla.

What about looking at what 37signals have on offer?

Personally I use a freebie basecamp account for day-to-day project management but am currently looking to start using backpack in my small team of developers. It's web-based and you pay a small subscription rather than a whopping up-front license fee. Thoroughly recommended…

bol. I believe the most important difference between opensource and commercial offerings is the use of WebDav.

You know, if you're really just after document management, I can't think of anything better than well organised fileshares. They are well understood by everyone in the buisiness, they need less specialist skills to maintain and most-importantly-of-all they work with all your software.

The numbere of times I've come across applications that struggle to access files in SharePoint, it drives me round the bend.

If you've got in house people ask them what they recommend/can maintain.

I'd rather use something my technical people understood and could maintain that cost a bit more than a cheap product they didn't have a clue about.

Give them the job of finding the product – they'll enjoy it and will feel motivated if it's somethign they've found when it comes to implementation and support. They're also more likely to understand what they're looking at when searching too 😉

I know I shamelessly suggested a bespoke system (as we can and do do them) but as a similar question – can anyone recommend an online 'support ticket' system that can be white-labelled? Ie, when a client has feedback on work that needs approval/amends etc, it can all be documented online and via email.

Ta.

m_f – have a look at Fogbugz. It's not free but it's pretty good for tickets and also as a project management tool.

Many thanks – that looks great (at first glance) – will have a proper delve during the day.

🙂

mastiles – you might also want to have a look at Mojo Helpdesk ( http://www.mojohelpdesk.com/ ) looks good to me!!

EDIT – doh!! I saw "feedback" and got carried away. Now I've actually READ your post, I'd be more inclined to have a look at some of the tools that Atlassian make…

don't go looking for technology/tools until you can articulate what you need it to do for your business and what scenarios you want it to be used in.

define your Business Needs for tools and only when clear about why you are looking for a tool should you delve into solutions.

You know, if you're really just after document management, I can't think of anything better than well organised fileshares.

Version control.

Assuming you're not able to use revision control systems and need some place for collaborative document / intranet writing plus document version control and access via web interface, you're basically looking at a wiki with good attachment handling.

Drupal and Joomla look interesting, when we went through this excercise a couple of years ago nothing seemed perfect and we ended up using something called samepage (from e-touch), which works well enough but has enough minor irritants to make it unpopular (also you'll need mysql and tomcat and installation wasn't as easy as it might have been).

Thing is, this is such an obvious thing, why doesn't someone make a decent product? There are lots of things that are nearly right, but nothing that has it just sorted.

Maybe google will clean up in a year or two with something really neat.

Edit: mf – +1 for FogBugz.