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Groupware for Small Consulting Organizations?
vrmlguy asks: "I've worked for several small consulting organizations over the past few years, and have discovered an unmet need. Every place I've worked has developed lots of code (usually scripts) that rarely gets reused except by the person who wrote it. Management always talks about 'knowledge management systems', but nothing ever gets off the ground. Does anyone know of something that works? I've looked at the CMS Info and TECFA Portals Pointers web sites, but haven't found much that seems to meet my needs. What I think that I need is something similar to sourceforge, but without the bells and whistles. BSCW looks like the closest fit, but I've got a few concerns about its licensing. The ideal solution would let me control any code that I upload, and search other peoples' code for stuff I can download and modify for my own use. CVS is overkill, since I expect that people will rarely check things back in that they've downloaded. Ease of use is important, since people always think it's easier to write from scratch than to search for things to reuse. Security is paramount, since there will be a lot of code that, for various contractual reasons, we don't want to share with anyone. Does anyone know of a great project that I may have missed?"
SourceForge is a Very Bad Idea (tm) at this point.
The only source code that is available is almost two years old, and the SourceForge.net people have intentionally killed further outside development of the official SourceForge project.
The current version of SourceForge is *not* available as source, at least, not without paying big bucks. In other words, it's no longer open source. Of course, SourceForge.net will squirm and twist things like there's no tomorrow to get away with not admitting that they closed SourceForge.
Additionally, the version of SourceForge that is available is unbelievably difficult to set up, doesn't run very well, and is very SourceForge.net specific. It's set up to run on PostgreSQL, and yet all the documentation (what (very) little there is) talks about MySQL.
If you want something like SourceForge, only more oriented towards a smaller, more private, organization, you should investigate GForge. GForge is a much reworked fork of SourceForge. The fork was started by Tim Purdue, one of the original, and primary, authors of SourceForge, and is now being actively developed by the community.
GForge has also had it's goals and orientation changed slightly from SourceForge's. SourceForge was designed to work as a huge farm, managing hundreds of thousands of users and programs. A huge portion of it's functionality is superfluous and overly complicated. GForge is a simplified and better organized application designed specifically for use by smaller groups and companies for their own projects.
Personally, for what it sounds like the original poster is looking for, I'd recommend GForge coupled with a good Wiki. That should cover almost everything he needs.
Topher