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."
Alfresco (Score:2)
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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.
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dotCMS is (like most other 'CMS's out there) a WebCMS, while Alfresco is a Document manager (which can publish to web, but it's not the main use).
It's a big difference, in fact i don't know why they're called the same. The functionality intersection is very thin.
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That may work but we will have to find a way to get the documents into the cloud first. I propose a small air cannon and projectile capsules (with wings!) that can fit 20-30 documents at a time.
The only problem is that we will not be able to collaborate when the weather is nice outside, and when the cloud IS available our documents may arrive soaking wet. We will have to study this further but i think you're on to something.
Couple ideas... (Score:2)
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/ [activestate.com]
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Trac + some extensions should do the trick.
Would a restricted MediaWiki instance (with anonymous viewing restricted to Main Page and Special:Userlogin) work?
http://www.activestate.com/firefly/
Bang bang [youtube.com].
You're not looking for a CMS. (Score:1, Insightful)
You're looking for groupware.
Sharepoint (Score:1, Funny)
DUCKS
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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: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.
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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.
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going from a windows server to OSX... I've done it with both webdav and samba, and samba was by far the superior method.
I'm not sure why we didn't do it before. I think it had something to do with an update in 10.5 regarding only having to enter the password once rather then over and over again.
Granted Webdav was more seemless, but it didn't do well with performance.
This is before the fact the as you mentioned you need to use samba to get the file to right to the database correctly. But this is theory as I
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Before i get flamed Right =! write, damn rote memory
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Did you mean wrote memory ?
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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 compan
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But is STORES THE BLOBS IN THE DB, which is crazy for long term use.
We've been running this way for years. We haven't had problems from Blobs in our DB.
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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.
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That's funny, I get an authentication prompt from IE to view the folder, then opening a file gives me another prompt because Word does not share IE's authenticated session. I always complained about IE not using the normal download-and-ShellExecute() method, then found out via Microsoft's KB that it's WebDAV asking for the additional authentication.
When looking for the article to include here, I instead found this, "Authentication and security in the WebDAV environment" from the "Microsoft Office 2008 for
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That's funny...
Ah, see, if you were "correctly" set up in the same AD realm as the SharePoint server, when IIS said "hey, you, authenticate via SPNEGO please", your clients would say "okay, here's my kerberos ticket, go to town". Regardless of how many times they asked for it.
But if you're not in the right realm or don't have a kerberos ticket or whatever, the SPNEGO falls back from Kerberos to NTLM (almost the same as "digest auth" in theory, just completely incompatible with it in practice). So, you're getting the non
by design: (Score:2)
"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.
More info please ... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 r
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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?
From the submitter's post:
share documents easily with people from outside the team without any software installation or login required
Sounds like he wants the read-only users to have no login.
Obviously read/write users need to login. Otherwise how could you track changes properly?
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
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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:Confluence. (Score:5, 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?
Redmine or Basecamp (Score:3, Informative)
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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."
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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.
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There is also Trac, (Score:2)
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? [foswiki.org]
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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.
Google Web Suite (Score:1)
Alfresco (Score:1)
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.
Google Docs (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Google Docs meets every one of your requirements.
Documentum (Score:2)
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Yes, I've tried IE-tab in Firefox. Something Documentum does crashes Firefox (tried with several different versions of FF) when you try.
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.
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.
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This is obviously a new meaning of 'simple' we were not previously aware of.
No... Google Docs is "simple". MediaWiki is "simple". Plone (and Zope) is a forklift swinging a sledgehammer.
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There, fixed it for you.
From the point of view of an admin or a user? As a user, using Plone is no more difficult than using Google Docs, and it has the extra features on his tick list. You create folders and pages; edit the page content in a WYSIWYG editor; upload files for common use and (if required) embed links to them in
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To get it up and running you just need to run the unified installer [launchpad.net] (also for Mac [plone.org]) and then point your browser to your chosen port. Administration is done with a simple and friendly GUI.
You don't need to install a LAMP stack and setup a database, so it's fast and pretty easy to get running; it's not the brutish beast you are depicting, so please don't spread FUD about a great piece of free software.
If this guy knows his way around a command-line, he might want to try installing it the "
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Customization is simple and these days doesn't require much if any modifications of the templates. It appears that you have not taken the time to use the product correctly or you wouldn't be slinging fud like that.
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some may argue that Plone is actually a big and complex system
There are plenty of big and complex CMS's out there that aren't total pieces of crap. Plone isn't one of them. Run as far and as fast as you can from Plone, my friend.
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Why not a wiki? (Score:1)
For a marketing research team? (Score:2, Insightful)
Cyanide capsules ought to do the trick.
The Cloud! again (Score:2)
Another option might be to use a SaaS-based CMS tool like bitsybox: http://www.bitsybox.com/ [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
Liferay (Score:2, Informative)
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this.
I use liferay, and it sounds like what the TS is looking for. extremely easy to get set up, especially if you use the Social Office variant.
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Try Plone (Score:2)
In the past I've used Plone [plone.org] 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 profe
Subversion (Score:1)
Perfect cross platform solution for your group (Score:1, Insightful)
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
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Despair (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Despair - or Train? (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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You can lead a horse to water...
Forcing someone to sit in a training class doesn't mean they'll actually learn anything beyond what it takes to complete the course. For everything else, the helpdesk will pull their fat out of the fire.
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"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."
There's cross-platform cvs clients. It supports all the listed requirements including tags. And you can put a document in a public folder and email out a URL to that file which can be accessed without login.
Build your own (Score:2)
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 accum
OneNote + Sharepoint (Score:2)
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
funny the two stories being next to each other (Score:2)
http://books.slashdot.org/story/10/04/21/131224/Joomla-15-Multimedia?art_pos=6 [slashdot.org]
It's a WikiWikiWorld! (Score:1)
svn and confluence? n/t (Score:1)
simple group ware and or docmgr (Score:1)
Simple group ware is, simple (ie don't expect complicated features), but it is really nice.
http://www.simple-groupware.de/cms/ [simple-groupware.de]
DocMgr is also very good.
http://www.docmgr.org/ [docmgr.org]
Both have webdav support and versioning.
Open Atrium (Score:2)
Open Atrium [openatrium.com] 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 [officelive.com] could also meet your needs. I'm not sure how complicated you want to get.
Kablink + iFolder (Score:1)
Qarks AVS (Score:1)
File sharing + Desktop Google (Score:2)
Just share a folder, and use a tool like Desktop Google http://desktop.google.com/ [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.
Optix Document Management System (Score:1)
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
I wrote my own CMS... (Score:2)
I'm sure it is too minimalistic for you, but I have friends using it in their companies intranets: werc [cat-v.org].
It is implementing the rc shell [cat-v.org] and is very simple and designed for extremely lazy people like me that wants to do as little work as possible.
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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.