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."

You're not looking for a CMS.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're looking for groupware.

More info please ...

[oldspewey]

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?

Google Docs

[Baricom]

I think Google Docs meets every one of your requirements.

For a marketing research team?

[GungaDan]

Cyanide capsules ought to do the trick.

Perfect cross platform solution for your group

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Confluence.

[nschubach]

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?

Despair

[necro81]

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.