I'm in the process of trying to setup a functional intra net that would work with our Base. We are an operating location for Impact World Tour and have 12-15 people working in and out the office plus upward of 20 volunteers. We were using 37 Signals Base Camp but would it very limiting. So I am now looking at Sharepoint. It seems to have a lot of very useful features like it integrates with Office 2007 very easily which we all use. I was wondering if anyone has had any experience in using it, setting it up? Does anyone know of any alternatives to Sharepoint. We really need a versatile Project Management solution and so far it seems the best I can find.
Comments
Re: sharepoint
Well I would say the questions is what you would to do. If you just want a store for some files full integration with office and money doesn't matter sharepoint is a good solution.
In my company we use a wiki who's called twiki. I like it it's very flexible and open. It works well for the developer in my company.
mcjobo
What would you use the Intranet For?
I reckon that the question by mcjobo is really what is at the core of choosing an Intranet.
We use a local installation of Sharepoint here at Reef to Outback and it works great, but there is a lot of work involved in setting it up and running it. If you are already running a Microsoft Server network than it's possible that you already have all the components needed for Sharepoint. If you run Sharepoint Services 3.0 then it's already included in Microsoft Windows Server 2003, so you will only need the Windows Server Client Access licenses, which you should have already anyways.
For YWAM Australia we also use Sharepoint, but we use a hosted solution for that, which eases the burden on the IT area substantially. We go through Mail2Web for our hosted solution, and it's only costing about $15.00 per month for unlimited users. It works pretty well, and removes a lot of the burden with hosting it locally.
You can also look at using Google Apps as another option. The YWAM Base in Darwin, Australia is currently using it, and is finding it quite useful. They offer a paid solution, as well as a free solution. For most YWAM bases the free solution would work fine. You can associate it with your domain name so that you can also handle off your e-mails through there, and it includes document control and document editors, so it's a fairly well rounded solution, especially since it is free.
The challenge with hosted solutions obviously is your Internet connection, so most of my advise might be useless in your circumstances, but take it for what it is worth.
Bill Hutchison
Reef to Outback
Sharepoint
At our base we have been using sharepoint for a few years now. Sharepoint 2007 is really good and seems like a completely different beast from SPoint2003. As Bill mentioned it does take quite a bit of Admin work during and after setup but it works very well. The down side is cost and licensing, there's a whole load of things you need to understand about licensing before implementing Sharepoint. If you are looking for a smaller "Group collaboration" tool, I came across this one Mindquarry (http://www.mindquarry.com/) on the Linux Magazine - June 2007 which seems very interesting. I haven't actually used it yet but am planing to have a go at it at some stage soon. It's developed in Java. We've also used in the past the Suse Linux Openexchange server (email and collaboration) and Novel has a line of Work group collaboration solutions. http://www.novell.com/collaboration/
re: Sharepoint
Hi,
I don't know at what alternatives you have looked at so far. But some other possibilities might be these:
http://www.phpgroupware.org
http://www.egroupware.org
http://www.dotproject.net
Since you are looking into sharepoint I guess you have a Windows Server. I haven't checked if any of these can or can't run on a Windows server. But that should not be the issue at the end, I guess....
Greetings from the MatriX,
neo