Simple CMS For Mixed Mac/Windows Team? 119
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."
Confluence. (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
Redmine or Basecamp (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Confluence. (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.
Re:Sharepoint (Score:5, 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.
Re:Alfresco (Score:3, Informative)
Try Plone (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Liferay (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sharepoint (Score:5, 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.
Re:Alfresco (Score:3, Informative)
Oi, I tried it. I didn't like that one. In fact, I've tried every major CMS out there.
I'd suggest also looking at dotCMS -- it's fantastic. I ported a medium-sized financial site to it almost a year ago now and couldn't be happier. It's been very stable and supports multiple themes. It's based on velocity, which isn't my favorite thing, but it's easy enough.
Re:Redmine or Basecamp (Score:3, Informative)
Stay FAR away from Basecamp. We used it at my organization for about six months before running far, far away from it. 37Signals was very unprofessional. They would push major project changes out without any heads up and end up breaking all sorts of functionality. Any requests for improvements or new features were met with an attitude of, "If you don't like the way we designed the software, fuck off and go use something else. We don't care."
Re:Redmine or Basecamp (Score:3, Informative)
They definitely have that attitude, but I used them for a number of years without having them break anything. Stopped about a year ago because it didn't make business sense--we weren't using it enough. The product was fine (in my experience), but the company is definitely what you'd expect from the schmucks who invented Rails.
Re:Sharepoint (Score:2, Informative)
Technically you can get by with SharePoint in a shop that's not 100% Windows. But don't try.
I work in a company that is mixed Macs and Windows. I'm the Mac admin. The heads of the IT department decided to use Sharepoint. While the experience is much better for the Windows users, it *DOES* work for the Mac users as well. Yes, they have to sign in to use it, as our Macs aren't on the AD domain. Sometimes it doesn't like Safari (but we also have Firefox available for our Mac users, and it seems to get along with that). Now that the users are used to it, it's not much of a problem. In a company that's 90% PCs, we don't have much say in what they use, so for us, it works, and the minor inconveniences for Mac users is a small tradeoff.
It might not be the way I would have done it, but I haven't had a problem with it. I'm not saying you should use it, I'm just saying that it will work, and in production, it's not as much of a PITA as others have have been claiming.
Re:Redmine or Basecamp (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sharepoint (Score:1, Informative)
SharePoint 2007 didn't work all that well with macs, but we've been testing SharePoint 2010 with macs and it works really well. Pretty much everything work with firefox on the mac and nearly everything works with safari.
Re:Sharepoint (Score:3, Informative)
Short of converting everything to Google Docs, you've got to let someone download the PPT/XLS/DOC/PDF at some point.
No, you don't. That's what WebDAV is for. MacOS supports it just fine, it's just that SharePoint doesn't expose its WebDAV URLs to anything but Windows.
DocuShare - Documentum too expensive. (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:Alfresco (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Redmine or Basecamp (Score:3, Informative)
Redmine on RedHat was a nightmare for a colleague of mine.
On FreeBSD it was cd /usr/ports/www/redmine ; make install ; make clean ; vi /usr/local/etc/rc.d/redmine #edit to allow startup and then follow the instructions at http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/RedmineInstall [redmine.org] from step 2 on.
The only problem with redmine has been figuring out which extensions to install. Which isn't that bad of a problem.