Re: Anyone use Community Server for an Intranet? Compared toSharepoint? Or other 'portals'?

On 10.03.2006, at 17:18, Austin, Darrel wrote:

> I was asked this off-list, but figured I might as well come clean  
> on the
> list.
>
>> What are the reasons for not using Sharepoint?
>
> Damn. I was afraid someone was going to ask that. ;o)
>
> Alright, here are my reasons. If anyone wants to comment/counter  
> these,
> please do.
>
>> From a training course I've taken on Sharepoint and what research  
>> I've
> done, things that make me question sharepoint are:
>
>  - inflexible end-user interface
>     - heavily dependant on iFrames
>     - limited customizability of built-in web controls
>         - we'd have to build our own controls
>  - oddly arcane admin interface
>  - seems tied into FrontPage
>  - seems to work great *if* everyone in the organization
>    properly uses MS Office and Teamsites
>     - would involve a lot of training
>         - people still wouldn't want to deal with it and
>           would revert to old habits
>
> Sharepoint seems like a great idea, but implemented rather  
> haphazzardly.
> It also looks like it would work perfectly *if* you accept the product
> as-is and not want to modify it too much and *if* your staff  
> accepts the
> new system and maintains most of their content via the MS Office <->
> Team site integration.
>
> For the most part, it seems overkill for what people want/need in our
> organization, and rather inflexible as a tool.
>
> In fact, it's pretty much the same thing we discovered when  
> shopping for
> a CMS for our public site. Lots of CMSes had lots of great features,
> but, in the end, we only needed a hanful of them, plus a bunch of  
> custom
> options that we were going to have to build ourselves anyways.
>
> Ultimately, we're thinking the solution would be to get folks using
> teamsites that are willing to actually use them to maintain their own
> documents within their department, then use another tool to  
> selectively
> publish the documents they want to share system wide.

Magnolia DMS can do that. While the document management part is still  
basic, its GUI is very nice and it has a very slick meta data based  
search. Meta data is easily customizable at run time, so you can  
simply define the fields you need, and the query builder will  
automatically offer the customized meta data fields as options to  
search on.

You can set up Magnolia in such a way that each department would have  
their own server, and publish to a common server all documents they  
want.

Missing at the moment is webDAV - the Magnolia team is working on it.  
On the bright side is the integration with Magnolia Web Edition,  
which lets you query the DMS from the intranet site and list / access  
the results.

Note: I am part of the Magnolia team.

Regards
Boris Kraft
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Magnolia Content Management
http://www.magnolia.info/
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