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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."
I think Google Docs meets every one of your requirements.
I'm still waiting on the day when there's a CMS without check in/out interaction. It's hard enough getting our designers to use a CMS let along making them actually check out what they want to work on (Since it's right there on their hard drive... they don't need to get it!) Some of our developers are the same way. If only someone created a "file system" hook or a special folder that automatically handled all this in the background like DropBox on steroids, it would go a long way to solving this. Computers are supposed to make lives easier, not add steps to the workflow, right?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
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.