[SLL] free-er alternatives to SharePoint, Exchange [was: Arrgh, Lake Washington School District requires IE...]

[Phil Mocek]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 08:36:19AM -0700, Ski Kacoroski wrote:
> I did find out from looking at the page source that the [LWSD]
> site is based on MS SharePoint Portal.

<shudder>

I'd never even heard of SharePoint until about a month ago when my
new boss started talking about using it at our new office.  My
first experience with it was at a SaaS hosting provider we've been
evaluating, OpSource.  Their SharePoint setup, at least, is
absolutely horrendous.  It's slow, the UI is non-intuitive, there
are non-links used all over the place where links should be (so no
firing off new tabs/windows from one mother page) integration with
their clunky issue-tracking software (Right Now) is broken, and
there is *no way to intentionally log out* -- none!  Not that
logout is broken (as it is with Right Now) -- logout is simply not
an option.  Their support people told me to close all
portal-related windows.  This reaction wasn't be a total surprise,
as the document they provided to explain how to get on the VPN
begins, "In your Internet Explorer, browse to..."  They offer
Linux servers, but seem not to come from a Unix background.

In case anyone is interested, there's a content management package
called Alfresco [1] that seems to be a viable SharePoint alternative.
It's written in Java, is open source, and is available both for
free and for fee.  I haven't used it, but it looks good.

Confluence [2] is another consideration.  It's primarily a wiki,
but it's a really nice one, and it integrates with the excellent
issue-tracking software, JIRA [3].  It, too, is written in Java
and is open source, but it is not free.  There's a plug-in for it
that allows people to edit and save wiki pages via DAV as Word
documents.

On a similar note, Zimbra [4] has become an excellent alternative
to Exchange, and is due for a major version upgrade in November
that will add support for Outlook 2007 and Windows Vista.  Zimbra
(the company) were purchased by Yahoo this week.

All these alternatives will run on Linux, Mac OS, and in some
cases, Windows.

I'm spending lots of energy lately trying to help the company I'm
working for not dive headfirst into the "forced upgrade treadmill"
of Exchange/Outlook/SharePoint/Vista/Office2007 as we bring on new
people who are unfamiliar with anything but that world.  I'm barely
keeping my head above water.


References:

[1]: <http://www.alfresco.com/products/ecm/>
[2]: <http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/>
[3]: <http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/>
[4]: <http://www.zimbra.com/>

-- 
Phil Mocek