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Simple CMS For Mixed Mac/Windows Team?

Posted by timothy on from the fire-everyone-else-problem-solved dept.

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."

9 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Confluence. by saintlupus · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    1. Re:Confluence. by Em+Emalb · · Score: 3, Informative

      Confluence is what we use. Works very well for what we use it for. Check in/check out, revision history, tracking, etc. Good stuff.

      --
      Sent from your iPad.
    2. Re:Confluence. by nschubach · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
  2. Redmine or Basecamp by irishfury · · Score: 3, Informative

    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/

  3. Re:Sharepoint by toastar · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't have any problem suggesting sharepoint, As long as it's not somewhere I have to work.
    Technically it's designed to be a CMS for Office docs, which is what the poster is looking for.
    But god after going through designing one I'll never take a job again that requires me to admin it.

  4. Google Docs by Baricom · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think Google Docs meets every one of your requirements.

  5. Re:Alfresco by mattz0r · · Score: 3, Informative

    We use Alfresco Enterprise and it should do exactly what you want. The free Community version is just as good and several of the engineers actively participate in the user forums on their website.

  6. Re:Sharepoint by DdJ · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't have any problem suggesting sharepoint, As long as it's not somewhere I have to work.

    I do, if it's a mixed windows/mac shop. The problem is, while many basic features work in a cross-platform way, the more sophisticated features don't.

    And I'm not just talking about "sophisticated" in terms of "power user". I'm talking about stuff like, if you're on Windows and in an AD domain, having single sign-on from your desktop "just work", while the MacOS folks have to type their username/password into the browser as if they were using basic auth (they're using SPNEGO-negotiated-NTLM, but the user experience is the same). And I'm talking about Windows users clicking on a Word document to have Word open the file in-place via WebDAV and save it back there without a separate upload step, while MacOS users have to do explicit "download, edit, save, upload" steps (which is one of the things a good CMS should help reduce, since in practice that inevitably results in multiple versions scattered all over and loss of control of which version is "master", for example when someone decides "oh, I already downloaded that, I don't need to again, let me just add another edit", and does an upload that trashes someone else's work).

    Technically you can get by with SharePoint in a shop that's not 100% Windows. But don't try.

  7. Despair by necro81 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.