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Simple CMS For Mixed Mac/Windows Team?
Quasar Sera writes "I am looking for a content and/or project management solution for a marketing research team using both Macs and PCs. Ideally it would support document sharing, metadata/tags, search capabilities, revision control, and the ability to share documents easily with people from outside the team without any software installation or login required. It may be tricky to configure (since I will be doing that) but must be dead simple to use for the rest of the team. We rely mostly on Word, Powerpoint, and Excel (all in their native file formats) for our work, so it would be a large number of fairly small files. Any and all advice would be appreciated."
Have you considered Alfresco?
what about the cloud?
Trac + some extensions should do the trick.
Activestate offers a great setup for a relative bargain that seems to do everything you're looking for.
http://www.activestate.com/firefly/
You're looking for groupware.
DUCKS
Document volumes? Are the sites geographically dispersed? It sounds like you can get away with something lightweight like one of the open source options (e.g. simpleCMS, Joomla, Alfresco) or maybe Sharepoint if that interface is more intuitive for more of your users. You might end up asking your users to standardize on a single browser, but there should be no need for software installation.
As for your "no login" requirement, do you mean you want something like LDAP integration, or are you just planning to run the whole thing wide open with no access control?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I spoke to some fellow higher education IT people last week who were putting all of their documentation into Confluence. I haven't used it myself, but they were very happy with it as a cross-platform solution.
--saint
Redmine is a free open source project. It can be very difficult to get up an running. 37Signal has a awesome product line to check out. It's all hosted, so no setup is required. http://37signals.com/
Sounds like using Google's web services would work very well for what you are trying to do. Google Docs would give you strong cross platform compatibility with the document editing plus revision control. Tagging I am not sure on, but seems like everything else is there.
I like alfresco because it can be quite simple to setup and get going yet very powerful if you need it to.
I used it's workflows, versioning and access controls a couple of years ago, very simple to setup and worked as advertised.
moi
I think Google Docs meets every one of your requirements.
ModX is amazing, check it out, modxcms.com
You might want to take a look at KnowledgeTree - http://www.knowledgetree.com/
If anyone at your company starts discussing SharePoint as a good idea, get an ax. They might not start attacking their co-workers looking for brains right away, but the process is irreversible. :)
Atrium.
Rocks very hard.
http://openatrium.com/
It's may be a bit more simplistic than required, but for a centralized communication point for a smaller team... Good stuff. Great stuff.
Documentum works well, but requires user login. It's got all the features you're asking for, but it does cost quite a bit, and support is rather slim. Actually, I am having a hard time imagining why you wouldn't want a user to log in. If you don't, then anyone can get access to whatever they want.
Try Plone: it's cross-platform, open source and quite mature.
I recently helped implement an intranet document sharing portal for a big bank in my country and it works remarkably well. Just make sure you use iw.fss or zope blobs to store those big files. With a vanilla Plone site you get fully indexed PDF, Microsoft Word and Openoffice documents indexed right out of the box. You can access your Plone site through WebDAV and define some fine grained ACLs to set group and user permissions. Also, versioning and some great workflow functionality is there.
Ok, some may argue that Plone is actually a big and complex system, but the core functionality works straight away once it's installed and the Plone community is full of very helpful people. Worth a look.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Hahaha, your funny. No really, you are.
Go fling yourself into traffic jackass.
Like dokuwiki, for example. It's simple to set up and configure, and is pretty powerful (especially through the use of plugins). I'm fairly certain it fits your criteria.
Cyanide capsules ought to do the trick.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
7 seat moped + Bitchin minivan + sub + jet = yes
and if that doesn't make sense to you then you are sadly mistaken.
Another option might be to use a SaaS-based CMS tool like bitsybox: http://www.bitsybox.com/
Some mentioned Google Docs and that is a good starting point. If you need more features you can always use the Google App Engine and their cloud hosting. Every install comes with Django and you can use other CMS tools (python and java support)
I'm sure there are others but my main point was this might be a use-case for software as a service. It's not right for every situation, but it might be something to look at. It may take some weight off of your shoulders.
Have you considered Liferay at all (http://www.liferay.com)? MIT License, open source, java based. You can download it on tomcat and run it without any configuration (using hypersonic) or configure your own database for it (mysql, oracle, postresql, whatever) pretty easily. Free as in beer and speech. In the interest of openness, I am a Liferay employee. I also use Windows, OS X, and Kubuntu with it on a daily basis. It has wikis, message boards, a document repository, web content management, basically anything you would need for a collaborative portal. It also supports multiple communities so you can create different sections for different user groups, ldap connectivity, and many other things. See here for our two offerings: http://www.liferay.com/products Social office is a simple one stop shop for inter office collaboration, Liferay Portal is the same but with a lot more power. It all depends on your needs.
What is "traffic jackass"? Now "jackass traffic", as in lots of onagers moving about, that might make sense.
At the bottom of the
In the past I've used Plone to do what you're asking. There are kits for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and *BSD and its open source.
Like anything there's a small learning curve but once you're past that creating new content is easy. Any uploaded files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, etc) are fully indexed for searching. It can integrate with Active Directory, LDAP, etc. It's extensible, skin-able and if the online documentation isn't enough there have been several books written about it (user guides and professional development).
I like it anyway.
Title says it all: Subversion
Go to toys r us and purchase several buckets of blocks with letters on them, acquire a desk in the middle of your office and post your messages. Or just grab an old workstation from the closet and toss linux and joomla! on it
Their code isn't perfect and they do push the Enterprise pay-support version pretty hard, but liferay portal or liferay social office should suit your needs with the added bonus that the sharepoint compatible web services let you edit files in place. It combines basically every useful open source java project (jackrabbit, lucene, axis, etc) and gives you a nice clean interface that I hate on hard, but sure looks like a lot of what's trendy in web design right now. Definitely worth a look because the demos run easily without any installation and it's very easy to extend even without any java programming.
We use www.cyn.in. It is based on plone with a slick interface.
A list of 343 vulnerabilities (and growing rapidly) on a 5 year old Joomla component ecosystem is a good reason to be critical of Joomla. The problem with allowing anyone to write components is that anyone will components...
I would say if it is a requirement that it be dead simple for the end user, your only recourse is to despair. No CMS system on the planet is dead simple to use. Easy doesn't exist, either. Moderately difficult can be found if you look around. The problem is that, while most reasonably competent people understand a hierarchical file structure (files, folders, drives, etc.), adding the extra dimension of time/versioning/check-in/check-out makes the average user crawl into a ball in the corner and weep. The publishers of such software, while they obviously understand this extra dimension, seem to have gone out of their way to obfuscate it. Most of these programs have some centralized database structure for storing the information, then present that as a hierarchical folder structure to the end user. The paradigm just doesn't quite work.
And don't get me started on what to do if you have inter-file dependencies, such as you have in CAD or software development! I have used several such systems as a necessary evil of being a practicing engineer, and every one of them is a kludge that should never have made it out of beta testing.
When did we abandon the idea of including training in system implementation? If you're considering a system like this you need to also be prepared to sit down each user (or groups of same) and teach them how to use it most effectively.
And to provide hand-holding and support for some period afterwards, and to provide user friendly (not "man pages") documentation for the moments when they forget how to do something.
Three Squirrels
Pointing to a list of old vulnerabilities that include beta versions of Joomla and older versions of 3rd party extensions is a good reason to be critical of your post. As with any responsible admin, I'm sure he will research 3rd party extensions of whatever solution he uses to ensure security.
As an educational institution you would qualify for free access to Google Apps (for your entire team +). Between Google Docs, Sites and Video I think that pretty much covers exactly what you're after.
If you've used Gmail you can have a look at all the tools right now - the links are on the upper left of the Gmail page.
Plus - nothing to install, nothing to maintain (other than your content), built-in anti-virus.
For collaboration teams you may well find that tools like Docs will make a huge difference to your teams productivity :)
J
OneNote as a desktop app, linked as a shared notebook on Sharepoint.
Everything dropped into OneNote can be easily managed through drag+drop. Works offline with synchronization when online. Auto-merges most things at the paragraph level (and has ability to manually merge other stuff). Sharepoint can handle the version control and you can fish older versions of each document out of there if needed.
Much content can be thrown in there (text, emails, screenshots dumped from clipboard, whatever), annotated and/or drawn over, and external files can be dropped right into it or linked via URL.
Using it internally for our team and it's bloody fantastic. The issue we had trying other CMSs (including various types of Wikis, shared folders, vanilla Sharepoint etc) is that they're tedious to use, therefore they don't get used. Our staff love using OneNote so it's being used extensively now. Don't know about its search capability (both OneNote and SP have search but I have no idea how good they are) but we have our folder layout carefully chosen so we can find what we need pretty quickly.
Have even used it recently on a larger project to assign tasks, with milestones and due dates, each one linked to their corresponding Bugzilla ticket that the owners can update as needed. For our small team this worked pretty well.
Not sure about sharing, but some ideas: OneNote can email individual pages as needed, or you could create separate notebooks per client (and let Sharepoint handle the security). Or you could print to PDF and email that out as well. Depends on what your needs are whether this would be a good fit.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
You want version control and full user login with permissions in a "Simple" CMS?
Keep on dreaming...
http://books.slashdot.org/story/10/04/21/131224/Joomla-15-Multimedia?art_pos=6
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Documentum is WAY TOO EXPENSIVE. If you're looking at Documentum, then you need to look at Alfresco and customization - you'll still end up costing 50% less or more.
Out of all the DMS I've used, installed, trialed, Xerox/DocuShare is by far the most intuitive, least hassle, just works solution. Alfresco would be my 2nd choice.
What you're after is called "wiki". There are many free software packages available.
Check out my cross-platform apps
Our company uses Jive's "Social Business Software" - it has pretty nice capabilities, I think you can share with outside folks, and it's good cross platforms. Worth a look: http://www.jivesoftware.com/
"basic features work in a cross-platform way, the more sophisticated features don't"
Microsoft has a strong motive to make sure the non-Windows experience sucks. Their business model implies that they must discourage anyone using Macs (or Linux).
Low standards of interoperability help them isolate and destroy marginal populations of other platforms in heterogeneous environments.
Refuse SharePoint, Windows, and all Microsoft products.
you had me at #!
Which is simple to setup and use, and on paper does everything in the summary.
But it seems more of a job for a dedicated wiki - maybe Foswiki?
you had me at #!
n/t
Simple group ware is, simple (ie don't expect complicated features), but it is really nice.
http://www.simple-groupware.de/cms/
DocMgr is also very good.
http://www.docmgr.org/
Both have webdav support and versioning.
EyeOS is a project that intends to build a web-based operating system. It is currently in a very usable state, and will run on any server where you can install a php-based cms. In EyeOS, every user has their own 'desktop', with configurable preferences, and a variety of applications exist which can be installed and customised - including Office and OpenOffice-compatible apps, that can open and produce Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Teams can share calendars, address books, todos, and leave each other messages in a shared bulletin board. There are also apps for managing email accounts, playing audio and video media, and lots of games.
It is very simple to setup - as simple as a php-based CMS - and because of the desktop-like interface, it's quite easy for users to intuitively find their way around.
Open Atrium is a multipurpose intranet/project management system built with the open source CMS Drupal. It's easy on the eyes and since it's just a fancy distribution of Drupal it can potentially be extended in almost any direction. Worth a look, sounds like it could address all your needs.
But then again it also sounds like Microsoft Office Live Workspace could also meet your needs. I'm not sure how complicated you want to get.
Because most people don't want to be trained, and when they are put into a training class they don't absorb anything that they're taught.
Sitting in training is tantamount to being told how to do your job, and people don't want to be told how to do things.
Hi, I suggest you go for the complete Novell Teaming package, its has exactly all the feature you request. IFolder lets you share documents across mac, linux and windows. Its very much like dropbox. And Teaming lets you collaborate with collegues and people on the outside (like alfresco and sharepoint but better for collaboration). And its opensource. Se this demo: http://www.novell.com/products/teaming/demo.html http://www.kablink.org/ The software is availeble on VMWARE images so you can have a demo running in no time!
Many places assume that because all is pint and click it must be easy.
Newsflash: it isn't.
You have identifeid some of the concepts that are new in such systems, so, who is exlpaining this to users?
Nobody?
There you go...
Troll Inc. should be the only place on Planet Earth where people refuse to receive training.
And the only one where management can't mandate that employees complete the training required to perform their duties...
Seriously, that may be the best solution. It's what I ended up doing in a similar situation recently, because everything I could find was either 1: too expensive, 2: not cross-environment compatible (Sharepoint), 3: not stable/secure/reliable (many open source projects), and/or 4: difficult to use (just about everything -- in fact, they had used Sharepoint for a while and were desperate for anything else).
People like to talk about the virtues of software reuse, but they rarely mention the downside of accumulating complexity as a single program tries to do more and more -- or of attempting to force users into a single mold in order to limit complexity. Particularly when it comes to content management (and the intricacies of traditional version control systems versus the desire of non-technical users to just Get Things Done), if you consider the running cost of user support, it can sometimes be more efficient to build custom software that does exactly what you need, the way you need it to.
Hi, I'm part of the team working on Qarks AVS (google it). It's a configuration management tool that is actually a hosted java web-application. What does that mean? Well, it'll work on any OS that supports java (i.e. all of them). All the users need to do is open a webpage with the browser of their choice.It'll then open the application for them, and display their workspace. It's built on Tomcat and Postgresql, which makes it very easy to set up on the server side too: The server can be on any OS - we have a one-click installer for Windows, and detailled instructions for Unix variants (Linux, OSX etc). Then you get revision control, versioning, as well as custom lifecycles, change requests, integrated merge and diff tools, etc and complete customisation of access modes, which means you can set it up for clients etc... There's even a shell extension for windows, so that you can do all the versioning work without even launching the program! It's free for groups of 3 users or less, educational projects, open-source projects, and non-profits: Give it a try!
Just share a folder, and use a tool like Desktop Google http://desktop.google.com/, so that it will index your files.
If I remember correctly, you can access to a distant Desktop Google with your browser.
This way, you can fine tune the rights for every folder without having to use a complex web interface.
Not to mention that this list is comprised mostly of 3rd party apps that run under Joomla 1.0.x. Hell there's even a few apps I created with a teammate that we stopped development on years ago. Strangely enough, I still find them in use all over the world.
The community has always been diligent about finding, reported and fixing security issues in a timely fashion, and I think it's easy enough to verify without taking either of ourt words for it.
Our company has been developing client-server cross-platform document management systems since 1988. We support native Mac and PC as well as thin clients and can store and index any desktop file as well as handle scanning from either client platform. All of the biggie commercial DBs are supported and we run with Unix, Linux, OS X and Windows servers. Install and train at your site in a week. Can also include sophisticated workflow and text search if needed. Check us out at mindwrap.com
http://www.concrete5.org - Go to any page in your site, and a editing toolbar gives you all the controls you need to update your website. No intimidating manuals, no complicated administration interfaces - just point and click
Most people want to know how to do things better. It's just that a lot of people are really lousy trainers. And a lot of managers think that training is money wasted.
Three Squirrels
The 2010 edition of Sharepoint addresses many of the issues raised, particularly by using cross-platform Silverlight for many user interactions and - importantly - allowing users to have offline copies of libraries that can be synched up when back online - one big issue for many mobile workers.
It has far, far fewer proprietary controls and browser specific plug-ins than the 2007 editions
I recommend SVN + TRAC. after set up, it works better on Windows than Mac, but it works well on the Mac nonetheless.
I'm sure it is too minimalistic for you, but I have friends using it in their companies intranets: werc.
It is implementing the rc shell and is very simple and designed for extremely lazy people like me that wants to do as little work as possible.
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson