[ale] Update Linux alternative to Sharepoint

[George Carless]

Good luck. My experiences with Sharepoint have been pretty miserable, but it depends on what you need 
to do with it. But I wouldn't hold out much hope of doing any custom branding, expanding the built-in 
functionality to a great degree (unless you have a bunch of Microsoft coders at your disposal), etc.  
What's there is _ok_ if everything else you're dealing with is MSFT-based, although in my experience 
the search is pretty terrible, too.  I do like some of the ways it allows content to be treated in 
different ways (lists, spreadsheet view, etc.), but even there it's inconsistent and rather 
infuriating.  Oh, and it's stupidly expensive and bloated, too.

Now, to your original question, I'm not sure that it's possible to answer "what's a good alternative 
to Sharepoint," but it might be easier if you'd define what you're looking for, what the goal is. I 
tend to feel that for collaboration, a decent Wiki is better than Sharepoint; indeed, for most tasks 
I think Sharepoint makes life too complicated for the average user... but, again, it depends on what 
you're really looking for.

George

Craig Button 
(craigb.rn at gmail.com) wrote the following 
on Tue, Sep 
29, 2009 at 02:06:26PM -0400:
> A week or so ago I posted a request for suggestions for a Linux alternative
> to MS SharePoint.  I didn't get much in the way of responses, so I've had to
> do some research myself.
> 
>  
> 
> Well I started with MS.  I downloaded demo of  MS Server 2007 and SharePoint
> 2007.  Once burned to DVD I installed it on a new leftover computer with a
> new hard drive.
> 
>  
> 
> 1.5 hours later I had an intranet up and running, with document sharing,
> discussion board, email, calendar sharing and document collaboration.  I
> added the 25 people to the domain, and it's been being tested for that past
> 5 days.   Easy and I never had to look at a manual or a book, it recognized
> all the hardware, took the IP address and all that kind of stuff.  Haven't
> calculated cost yet, but we are eligible to education discount.  I figure
> this weekend I'll look into security issues and then take the next step.
> Linux alternatives.  Oh and the VPN is through the router so I didn't have
> to look into that kind of stuff at this level.
> 

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