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Ask Pipedot: small office collaboration/messaging

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Engage A Consultant (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-11-17 15:46 (#2V3A)

These days, there's been a ton of innovation in these areas, and there's consensus that collaboration-by-email is not fun. And there are lots of new approaches to these age-old problems.

So, how would you do it?
I'd hire a consultant.

OK, seriously, what you are describing is nowadays referred to as a CMS - which can variously refer to call, contact, customer, configuration or content management system.

Some of the Wikipedia articles I'm about to cite identify some of the attributes that people care about, such as the ability to interact with the system via an electronic mail interface, or a web interface, or support for a specific operating system, or adherence to a specific license.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_management_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_configuration_management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRM_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_configuration_management_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software

Each of those attributes translates into a choice of different software packages, which it is worth your while to negotiate if only to keep the results manageable, so that, after the dust settles down, you don't have three or four different, contending open source RDBMS installed.

And so we return to the original advice: engage a consultant.

My personal favorite is RedMine, but the last time I chedked they didn't support FreeBSD too well, and there was that horrible dependency upon Ruby.

Many people like Trac, but the last time I looked, it didn't have security.

Re: Engage A Consultant (Score: 2, Insightful)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-11-17 17:34 (#2V3G)

Good advice, but your own response seems to me a reminder that there are no integrated systems that completely fit the situation (no surprise there) and it takes serious professional help to identify and install relevant systems.

Just discovered http://openkm.org, which is a doc repository that allows for check-in/out, team editing, and such. There used to be a similar system called o3spaces (Dutch), but they turned their attention to some kind of new Android/iOS app that does team writing, and they've let the collaboration system lapse, which is too bad - it was based on Tomcat and ran well. There are probably a few others out there. O3spaces had neat plugins for OpenOffice and MS Word so you could check out, edit, and then check back in your docs. That was awesome, but since the OO.o-LibreOffice split I haven't seen anyone updating their plugins and this model seems to be falling out of favor in lieu of constant-connection online editing, which is good if you're all plugged into fat connections but bad news otherwise.

On the messaging side, the ycombinator folks are crazy about something called http://www.slack.com which seems like running your business on twitter (internal communications) with links to Trello, Github, others. Seems pretty neat, but the messages don't get organized in a tree, so you've kind of got a running feed, which annoys me. I'd almost prefer an internal NTTP site (no peering, sharing) instead of corporate email, which sucks.

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2014-11-21 00:22 Insightful +1 pete@pipedot.org

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