Open Source Sharepoint Alternatives – Remote Collaboration

I originally titled this article “Open Source Collaboration – Stumbling upon Open Source Gems” but I know that I have been searching around using the current title’s keywords, so I thought it would be worthy to use it.

I’ve been in discussion with David Lee from Open Source Green Vehicle about using MediaWiki as the beginnings of a Product Data Management and collaboration platform. You can read David’s article here about the subject. I have been looking for a collaboration platform for myself also. The difference between the two is David wants the OSGV one to be mostly open from the web, whilst I want mine mostly private.

Currently, they are using WordPress as the main site, phpbb for the forums and with the addition of the MediaWiki, we were talking about migrating to BBpress for the forums and having a single-sign on for all of them. I came across a few other people doing or trying to do the same thing here, here and somewhere else for integrating wordpress, bbpress and MediaWiki.

Anyway, I came across Sandro Groganz’s blog “The Art of being Open” who had the same issue and saw this article “How to Blog Successfully” which I bookmarked for later reading.

I then read an article Sandro had written about SAAS and Open Source and his company Mindquarry. I decided to take a peek at what Mindquarry does – It’s exactly what I have been looking for over the last few weeeks. A Web2.0 Collaboration platform with a Java desktop client for synchronizing tasks and documents but additionally, it has a built-in wiki platform. I just played around with the Demo and it’s very, very cool – especially the timeline and versioning of the wiki.

I have been using ifolder for almost 2 years for remote file synchronization but they just can’t release a decent stable build that ‘just works’. I have fought and fought to get the client to install in both Windows and Linux environments and I have frankly, just given up. Trying to install the Linux client is a night long episode each time.

So, I was recently searching out alternatives and came across O3Spaces and PengYou and I was tossing up between them. Frankly, I am really not a fan of Java based applications but both of them and Mindquarry are built on Java, so it looks like I am forced down that path.

Mindquarry and O3Spaces offer Vmware images, which I would consider using to replace my Ifolder setup although I don’t fancy transplanting all my development websites, databases and mailserver.

So, has anyone used any of the above and can give any feedback on them? PengYou and Mindquarry are both open source whilst O3Spaces are said to be releasing an open source version very shortly.

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Published by salubrium

I am a Systems Administrator based in Sydney, Australia with some hugely varied interests: Topics covered are Virtualization, Web Hosting, Remote Desktop, Security and Backups, PHP, Python, MVC Frameworks, SEO

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