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if you glance at a program, decide not to bother figuring out how to use it and determine that it sucks only because it's put out by Microsoft then you don't have much of an opinion.

You're describing most of the comments here today. I know that there must be some technical and usability failings, but if Slashdot had a filter to scrub out anecdotal MS hate ramblings, there would not be much left in this story thread.

We use SharePoint, and as a *user*, I really don't have any issues with it, it beats what we had before here at AMC (Air Mobility Command). There are some minor things that I don't like, but nothing that would push me over the edge into a frothy mouthed frenzy. For those that loath Microsoft, there are alternatives, TikiWiki looks quite nice...

there are so many free solutions. tikiwiki beats sharepoint in most aspects, especially with the new workspaces feature comming in v4.0. couple that with some other solutions like horde, or some other online solution and you've achieved more, than you ever could with sharepoint.

Depend how deep the integration goes. A bit of does-it-all package is i.e. TikiWiki, where you have integrated (as in same user base, same general theme, all in the same environment and with ties between all parts) pretty good wiki, forums, image/file galleries and probably too much for your taste other features into the mix. In fact, wont be surprised in next year or even this one comes out a module for it with integration with Wave.

But a forum post (or this very comment) could be seen as a wiki page or an entry in the site news, all at the same time? A conversation could be morphed into the same kind of things? Maybe wave could be used as a somewhat "live" wiki, integrating maybe deeply all ways to see information about a subject, or even one of its extensions could be something that works that way to manage content in a site.

Was about to suggest that too. My biggest concern is that the "solution" dont solves one of the biggest problems: 2 access to get that URL. I must access the short url, wherever it is, parse/interpret headers, and then go to the real page.

With a simple solution that could be a symlink (or server configuration, or catch-all index.php that serves all the content directly) the client only must do one connection to get the real content of the page.

Of course, there is the option that your server/cms/whatever support meaningful short urls, like this rewrite rules.

TikiWiki allows word searching of uploaded files (batch loading from a file directory is supported). You'd need to convert the images to a suitable format (can a PDF hold a page image and text from OCR?), and a command-line filter which extracts text from the file for indexing. By default only the first 8K is stored, but you have the source code. Assorted command-line filters can be defined, so future PDFs can be stored directly.

How about TikiWiki?

Have people with questions fill out a tracker form (after searching the whole site) - trackers are used in the problem/suggestion forms on dev.tikiwiki.org.

Build an online manual in the Wiki tool, so site search will also search the manual. When a question is answered, answer it in the tracker and update the manual if necessary.

How about TikiWiki?

Have people with questions fill out a tracker form (after searching the whole site) - trackers are used in the problem/suggestion forms on dev.tikiwiki.org.

Build an online manual in the Wiki tool, so site search will also search the manual. When a question is answered, answer it in the tracker and update the manual if necessary.

Err... what? Even in the enterprise, I'm seeing Windows being scaled back, replaced, and sometimes outright gutted.

(funny you should mention Sharepoint... I replaced it @ work with TikiWiki for my department. Seems the folks I worked with hated having to email half-mile long URLs to each other just to point someone to a corp Sharepoint-stored file or message ;) ). IOW, it's only "hot" among all-Windows shops.

I do agree that MS has a large presence in the corporate world now, but I suspect that if Windows 7 is nothing more than Vista Mark II, and if Moore's Law can't keep up with the bloat factor, this will change drastically (which is why I said "It's not what a company has already done, but what they're wanting to do.").

And no, no amount of book-cooking by Microsoft (counting all OEM and end-user license sales --including XP sales-- as Vista ones) will change that.

/P

All of these are open source, built on LAMP, and run great on Windows.

HW & SW inventory: Winventory (http://winventory.sourceforge.net./
Trouble ticketing: Eventum (http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page ). The Anonymous Reporting Form is a time saver.
Cacti (http://www.cacti.net./ Graphs all parameters on your servers and routers.
Documentation: TikiWiki (http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php). It has articles, FAQs and LDAP integration.
FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Ma in_Page). Mind maps are a FANTASTIC tool for documentation and you can publish them easily on a web server (get 0.8.1 beta3).

These are free, and get the job done.
SysInternals's tools (http://www.sysinternals.com./ Process Explorer and TCPView are the most useful, and there are many other great utils.
KiXtart (http://www.kixtart.org./ The best language for login scripts, and just about all your scripting needs on Windows.
Network Notepad (http://www.networknotepad.com./ Draw your nework diagrams here, and then publish them on your web server.

I use IRM http://www.stackworks.net/view.php/irm/index.html for inventory, you can use also for ticket tracking. For misc. docuemtnation I also use TikiWiki http://www.tikiwiki.org/

Having a good permission system enables systems where you can decide how people interacts with the system (i.e. adding or viewing content) and where. The extensions enables i.e. drawings editing in a wiki-like scheme and its integration enables i.e. putting portions of blogs in wiki pages or including editables spreadsheets in.

My biggest use of it was for documentation, mixing blogs for tracking progress of projects, adding editable diagrams of networks, organizing and grouping the information in wiki pages and giving different kinds of priviledges to the development people (editors) from different kinds of viewers. But a lot of people gives a lot of different kinds of uses for it i.e. KDE project or voip-info.org.

I'd also suggest that you join the talk and community pages on wikipedia to make this suggestion.

TikiWiki (http://tikiwiki.org/) does a nice job of handling lots of different types of info, from Wiki pages via FAQs, Forums, Calendars, Shared Files and Pictures to Blogs and RSS feeds. It also allows you to send queries to your legacy databases and has a webmail interface (which even allows you to request/send Wiki pages by email !) The whole thing is nicely packaged for you to turn off the modules you don't (yet) need - using it with different customers and internally. And no, I don't have any business connection - I'm just a very happy user/administrator! Frankie

At the application level, this, and this are two possible answers, or at least workarounds. On the filesystem level, this could be a possible workaround as well.

I agree however that it would seem people have been caught with their pants down in regards to WinFS though. The usual sentiment about it among Linux peeps from what I've seen is that it either isn't doable, or that it is, but that it'd be horribly slow.

Methinks a change in attitude is called for, however. This could very well be Bill's answer to the One Ring if he gets it out, which is presumably why Microsoft are trying to get a working release ASAP. Forget the coder bias for a minute here, and think about what the implications of this could be from the perspective of ease-of-use...and then think about what a battle we'd have converting people to Linux if we still don't have it when Microsoft does.

Longhorn was intended to be a Linux killer...but of all the elements I've seen, WinFS is the only one which could truly cause us problems...Especially when you consider how difficult back-engineering compatibility with such an FS would probably be.

As I said, I'm aware WinFS hasn't been taken seriously around here so far...but somebody needs to start to.

• WordToWiki
• Word to Confluence

But yeah, if you're after a simple quick solution, Drupal is nice. It's more like fancy blog software than a full blown CMS IMHO.

Of course, i doubt being the 1st or the only one that used it, but at least when the idea come to me i hadnt read before that word.

TikiWiki has added many things over the years that could help with this.

Beyond that, maybe start with e.g. Horde and work from there?

Damien

Oh yea, when looking at CMS and tikiwiki, I found this url.
http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php?page=TikiFriend lyHosts

Thats why I finally tried 1and1.

...or Konqueror. The problem is their software, which I also used for my wikis but now I am migrating to TikiWiki.

• Portals - Think slashdot + forum + gallery etc.
• Wiki - Think wikipedia
• Blogs - Need I say more.
• Groupware - Think Sourceforge.

Tikiwiki tries to be all of this, and much more. And if the current feature list is not enough, just wait a few days/weeks for the 1.9 version (the site runs a recent cvs so most can be tried there).

At work, we use TikiWiki, but we have a lot of users and lots of files moving in and out, articles and such. I also use TikiWiki to talk between my family.

The only trick is that it can take a while to install (I watched our poor Gentoo web-server grind away for a long time compiling and installing MySQL, Apache with the mods, and the updated mail client). However, there is a lot of documentation on customization and use.

Although, if you're not looking for the blogs and the multi-user thing, try something else.

I would dig up the discussion about CMS's from a few months ago, but I can't seem to find it handily here.

Yes, have adds, yes, have some compatibility problems, dont have the extensions that Firefox/Mozilla have, yes, is not open source (to differenciate with "free", as you can get it without spending money).

In the other hand, is pretty stable (well, using 7.6 beta 2, i can leave some room for problems), it displays slashdot pretty well (with firefox, sometimes the content move to the black area on the right, a problem that had also Tikiwiki as explained here), it loads FAST and is pretty compact, the ads are text based (bit dependant on content like gmail ones, and i could re-register if want them off), have a good mail client, it have even a good rss reader integrated, and surely have some other nice features that i dont explored yet. Uh, and of course, gmail works with it pretty well.

Why that last switch? Installed firefox 1.0 RPM from SuSE and started to have problems (well, the right col bug problem was there from some time), firefox sometimes dont load (have to kill the task to retry), sometimes load, but don't display anything on browser's window (seems to work, just not show) and sometimes works. Of course, had to reinstall most themes/extensions, and somewhat between 1.0rc and 1.0 decided to disable the open of new windows from web pages.

I could had try to install another/newer rpm or from other format, clean configurations and try without extensions/themes, and so on... but too i can play a bit more with Opera and leave that test for later.

About opera's "market share", well, that seem to run well in the embedded market. Being small, with low requirements, fast and multiplataform enough are good advantages there and where hardware is not at the top. And for normal desktops still is a good alternative.

I took a while figuring out the whole Wiki thing, too...They are a difficult concept.
Installing TikiWiki and poking it with a stick was educational for me...you may find it to be as well. This bit of software will help tremendously as well.

Basically, the easiest way I've found to think of a Wiki is as a collaborative mind map, if such a thing is possible. I believe they are an attempt to store information in an even more context-specific way than the conventional Web, and in a manner which as closely as possible resembles that of an actual brain.

The other thing about Wikis is that they're lightning fast to write. Although HTML/XHTML aren't what you'd call rocket science, they're still sufficiently complex that it can be a pain to have to write out all the tags. With a Wiki, (http://www.yahoo.com|Yahoo!) will put a basic link in a page, but without an alt tag of course.

The main audience I've seen using them myself are FPS game mod programmers, although I know a lot of other people of course do as well. But the reason why they're a boon to the UT or Quake mod crowd in particular is because it basically allows them to write pages in two parts.

a) Textbook definition of class XYZ, what it does etc. (The theory)

b) Another section lower down where people can put war stories about experiences they've had actually coding with said class, examples of how to do it, or corrections/clarifications of elements of the definition. (The practice)

In this example, it's actually fairly similar to what php.net has for its documentation, except a wiki is probably a bit more specifically designed for that from the ground up.
Hope this helps...

Visually confusing?
My company uses TWiki internally, and though it took some tweaking, it now looks great.
Not much confusing or unwieldy about it, really. (or did you mean "willy dilly"?!?)

We're also looking at TikiWiki as the backend for customizable customer portals.

And even better if your wiki have installed some way to put online editable diagrams, sometime a picture is better than 1000 words. I think exist that feature for i.e. TWiki. The wiki i use, Tikiwiki, surely supports them, and gives collaboration to the diagrams level too.

1. You know, Microsoft has done an incredible number of crappy things, and they deserve most of the flak they get, but I don't understand why we can't just once acknowledge them for taking a positive step without making some cheap jab like this.

I don't think it's a cheap jab. Other articles about non-Microsoft projects/products offer comparisons to other non-Microsoft projects/products. (Example: Anything about the latest MP3 players.)

That said, Microsoft is fundimentially untrustworthy. The list of sneaky tricks they've pulled over the years does not make me want to jump at what they offer without looking very closely for yet another trap. (I have first hand experience as an OEM rep with Microsoft and OEM purchases.)

As for source code, unless they follow thier own advice and put the code under a BSD licence, why would I want to look at it?

1. "Microsoft released something as open source -- but let's all assume that a non-MS alternative is better even though we haven't made an actual comparison!" How immature can you get?

Better or not has little to do with it. That said, there are quite a few open Wikis and CMS programs out there already -- and similar programs you might be familiar with already.

What makes Microsoft's offering worth examining at all? There are so many others that have been out for years and cover just about every spot from small/light/easy through to complex/flexible/corporate. Does Microsoft offer support for the new open source Wiki like other companies do, or are they looking for someone else to do the enhancements and fix the bugs?

Ive been searching for a CMS/Groupware software for a long time.
Dabbled in a lot of wiki's, finally went on to tikiwiki.
Now that this professional server is released cant wait to try it out.
User management, access control, calendars etc. - a great thing for
web based content management - truly makes my personal data
management needs easier!

TikiWiki and TWiki are not the same wiki engines.

You want a good modern BBS, this looks like it could be a good tool for the task:

TikiWiki

But if the problem is to have in websites areas where visitors (even unregistered ones) can post random text and links, even slashdot is potentially target of the same (maybe should be a "Spam" mod score?) or by the way, any site where unregistered visitors can store content in a way or another, be wiki or not.

Maybe is not yet perfect, but i like TikiWiki because it have all in one single package (enabling some sort of integration between features, unified security, etc).

I'm using TikiWiki for projects, it provides me wiki pages, individual blogs for separate projects (and with wiki syntax), basic java drawing program for adding diagrams and collaborate on them, forums, comments and some granularity on permissions (i.e to limit what people can do on one project or another). The tool have a lot of more ways to collaborate, but with those functions are enough for most normal uses.

b2evo This is what I would recommend people check out first.
BBlog (requires PHP version 4.1 or greater & MySQL version 3.23 or greater)
Bit 5 Blog
blosxom (only need ability to run CGI scripts)
drupal.org (mySQL or similar required)
LiveJournal.org
MyPHPblog/Simplog (seems to require MySQL would have to download to be sure.)
Nucleus (requires PHP version 4.0.6 or higher and access to a MySQL database version 3.23.38 or higher)
Pivot (only php required)
pLog (requires PHP 4.1.x or higher and MySQL 3.1.x or higher)
Scoop (requires Apache with mod_perl and mySQL)
TikiWiki (requires PHP 4.1+ and MySQL. Very powerful software.)
WordPress (requires PHP version 4.1 or greater and MySQL version 3.23.23 or greater.)

This article discusses a new browser-based spreadsheet application in testing, just announced today on the OSCom mailing list. It also discusses browser-based open source applicaton alternatives in general.

Although it's very Wiki oriented, it also has a fairly robust CMS system and blogging features....extremely flexible. I use it on dailyread.com and have had very few difficulties with it. Standard Apache/PHP/MySQL setup. TikiWiki.org

Plone is not the only one open source CMS around. Tikiwiki, Typo3,Drupal and a lot more are open source, some even with commercial support (i.e. Typo3, comparing with it could be a bit more fair) if eWeek want that "feature" over every other possible functionality they could have.

I suggest you take a look at wikis. Every page just has an edit button and, while it takes an afternoon to learn HTML, you can learn wiki markup in 10 or 15 minutes. There are a whole bunch of wiki from the very simple to the extremely complex. TikiWiki is a particularly powerful one that can do everything you describe wanting to do.

If I suggest something, i would try to give or a from the start integrated solution (i.e. TikiWiki) or components that mix and match almost seamlessy (i.e. all they can share the same authentication system, very similar themes or one being plugin of another, and things like that)

Almost any functionality of any form requires learning to some degree. A radio-controlled car, a new stereo, a new cell phone. To expect something like this to require no learning curve at all is unrealistic. Also, most people take some interest in learning things (although I know I'm speaking for people I've never met here). With that in mind, could you not use TikiWiki and tune it a bit to strip off the goodies they won't use.

Another thing you can do to minimize the learning curve is document the features they'll be using, on their own site. That way they don't have to know anything but the url...they can see help on the front page, and utilize it.

Disclaimer: Yes, I'm one of the developers and am trolling for new users. You can't blame a guy for trying, right?

With that argument, then... Where is Linux? Where is Apache? Some open source applications should be so known that showing them there would be a waste of space.

If I would to choose just by popularity on that list, I would show KDE, gimp and OpenOffice, they are not new and are fairly known, but are between the more known open source applications of that list and won a lot of times awards like in LinuxJournal.

But, in the other hand, I would like to give some light to not so known applications to a wider audience, things could change. I surely would put there mplayer, but about the others is less clear. Maybe phpMyAdmin and GNUCash to cover different areas.

Also, the proposed projects are not so uniformly dispersed in the open source space. There are 3 projects that manage content in the web, like MoinMoin, Plone and Zope, instead of this I would propose TikiWiki that have a bit of each one. There are 2 that are just for developers, like SubVersion and Eclipse, and not sure if that will count for the "general public" or whatever goes to that kind of events. And there a some proposed programs that are fairy similar to widely know ones in the windows world, like Evolution and XMMS, that the general public will think that are Outlook and winamp and will not ask, and could give the false impression that open source is just copying other program features and not creating things completely new.