I've got some experience in the field as a consultant for a similar product called Alfresco, and I can see why it is such a big success. If there is anything that is much better, I haven't seen it yet.

So: what collaboration tool would you suggest for the average corporate drone to use? And no, git is not an acceptable answer.

>> So: what collaboration tool would you suggest for the average corporate drone to use? And no, git is not an acceptable answer.

Email + shared folder (as flat as possible) with rigorously enforced naming conventions. Clever features like search can be added with crawlers.

For me that would suffice - but its not the answer, I'm afraid. Management/IT wants to:

- have workflows, so documents can be approved among other stuff

- have document lifecycle, so they expire and must be reviewed after time x

- solve the Dropbox problem - how do you collaborate with external entities without compromising security by having users uncontrollably put stuff on Dropbox, because there is no other way?

- have automatic versioning

- be able to checkout/lock a file during editing

These are just a few aspects. You can do most if this by gluing stuff together yourself, but these are the constraints:

- be able to achieve all this with semi-competent IT staff

- seamless integration into the existing Windows infrastructure is a big plus

- be able to blame someone else if something goes wrong

So - what do you propose?

It is interesting how all these problems come down to basic CS concepts (cache invalidation, naming things, locks).

- Versions

"Doc-456 V-023" "Doc-456 V-024"

To maintain an archive files become read only after 24 hours.

- approvals

"Doc-456 V-024 Joe Bloggs ✔"

The problem with the semi-competent IT staff is that they are not immune to Microsoft's BS^H^H PR. They will really believe what the account manager told the CIO over dinner.

I hear good things about Alfresco. I have a lot of experience with Plone, which is also a very good foundation for a corporate intranet. I've deployed it countless times in this scenario, as well as the back-end of public-facing websites.

I took me a while to realise it but yes you are 100% right.

A few years ago I played with SharePoint for a bit and found some good use cases for it. Decided I'd throw some code together that I could wire into it and sell. There was a demand and SharePoint object model was pretty spot on.

4 days later I hadn't even got a bearable working SharePoint installation for doing dev against, had to throw another 4gb of ram at the machine I was working on and wanted to kick the shit out of the thing due to the recursive layers of batshit.

14 days later I had learned python, written the entire thing from scratch using django and had gone live with a client who still uses it today.

I did a lot of development on Plone and Zope. Mind you, Plone is not the easiest CMS platform to work with or to program for (you will regret using it at some point in time, but it will pass), but it used to be a great starting point for an office intranet. I am not sure how well it fits that use case now, but it's one of my preferred CMSs.

Yeah, them stupid people over at Volvo, the Department of Defense, the marines, the army - all of them are clearly idiots! Everybody should just use git repos and use javascript webapps!