Intranet Forum - Setup?

thewools

Was thinking about setting up a forum within the workplace for idea sharing, document control etc. I would like to host this internally on the server and wouldnt want it available online as such.

Budget has yet to be decided as this idea in early development (i presume the less the better), but what pieces of sofware would suit or examples / templates available??

sasmac

Why not try vBulletin. It is what this site runs on. It costs something like €200 for the software.

Beano

Take a look at sharepoint. The discussion part of basic compared to vBulletin but the idea sharing and document control works very well.

Anti

Beano wrote:

Take a look at sharepoint. The discussion part of basic compared to vBulletin but the idea sharing and document control works very well.

I have to agree. We use this in work and find it great. Especially for controlling documents, i.e only one user can bok it out and make changes, so it saves some lost info. It also works as a basic ftp client in a way too.

irlrobins

Of course Anti would say that as he works for Microsoft. But I have to agree Sharepoint is quite good and intregrates well with Office and Exchange. Of course you need a volumn license to buy it.

thewools

Anti wrote:

I have to agree. We use this in work and find it great. Especially for controlling documents, i.e only one user can bok it out and make changes, so it saves some lost info. It also works as a basic ftp client in a way too.

I will have to look at this software in more detail, as I'm not familar with it..

From speaking to the IT department they have said that we currently do not have a cgi folder and the option to run pearlscripts setup. At the moment we were looking into using a free open source forum program such as YABB (www.yabbforum.com) but this was only because we have used it to set up other forums online using our own personla webspace..

IT said they have been looking into Sharepoint themselves to facilitate collaboration and document management within and between departments but this is still at an early stage.

Would it be difficult to manange / set up for our department only (R+D)??

Snowbat

O³Spaces looks interesting - OpenOffice.org/StarOffice integration and ODF support too:
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/11/17/1958231

Stephen

Sharepoint is great, but if you want to do it on the cheap (free, in fact, providing you have the technical know-how to set it up), PhpBB might be useful for you. It doesn't have the fancy document management stuff, its just a forum.

Anti

Sharepoint is a bit of a nightmare to get started on to be honest.

Scuba_Scoper

For document control try
http://www.sourcejammer.org/

What about setting up an internal Wiki for discussions....

daveg

thewools wrote:

Was thinking about setting up a forum within the workplace for idea sharing, document control etc. I would like to host this internally on the server and wouldnt want it available online as such.

Budget has yet to be decided as this idea in early development (i presume the less the better), but what pieces of sofware would suit or examples / templates available??

I've just done completed this project myself at work. IT services host our intranet and I setup a vBulletin discussion forum (same as boards). Was very simple and is a great setup. vBulletin cost about E140.

thewools

Scuba_Scoper wrote:

What about setting up an internal Wiki for discussions....

We have been looking into this possiblity; where we could write up articles / discussions relating to certain sectors within the faculty - such as certain procedures within group, CAD techniques, info regarding plastic design, castings etc...

As I said we are still in early development - and we're still more or less brain storming and getting to together to come up with the best overall solution to put forward

Thanks for the info / help

Saruman

I found YABB way too annoying to configure.

PHPBB is excellent. Looks just like Vbullitin and is FREE. Very easy to configure too.
Check out my sig and go to forums, i did that very quickly for my wife.

Do you have a server 2003 system on your network? If you do then as others advised, sharepoint is a good idea and i believe its free for server 2003 and i think i saw it pre-installed on SBS 2003

SouperComputer

Sounds like you are looking for groupware software, rather than just a forum.

egroupware or Open-Exchange gets my vote. Open-Exchange integreates with Outlook for a fee should you need it to. Egroupware has an online demo that you can play around with and is open source. All you need is a LAMP or WAMP server for either of these.

You could also have a search on sourceforge for groupware and see if anything tickles your fancy.

stevenmu

Saruman wrote:

Do you have a server 2003 system on your network? If you do then as others advised, sharepoint is a good idea and i believe its free for server 2003 and i think i saw it pre-installed on SBS 2003

There's different levels of sharepoint available. Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 is free for Windows Server 2003 and provides the basic functionality. Microsoft Offices Sharepoint Server 2007 sits on top of it, requires a seperate purchase and adds a lot of more advanced functionality.

WSS 3.0 should provide most of the functionality you're talking about here, forums, wikis etc.

Like Anti says it can be a bit of a nightmare to set up, especially to do it properly in line with best practices, but there's plenty of documentation out there and to do a small simple installation to get one or two features within a department shouldn't be too bad.

rogue-entity

If I was going to pay for forum software, I would get Invision PowerBoard instead, its cheaper then vBulletin too, and IMO, it offers better features.

vBulletin will only work with the MySQL database, IPB will work with all the major ones.

vBulletin Leased: €74, plus €30/year renewal or you have to delete your board, free upgrades/updates.
vBulletin Owned: €139, plus €30/year renewal if you want upgrades/updates, but you can keep the board without renewing.

IPB: €103, optional renewal after 6months for upgrades and support, but either way, you can keep your forum once you buy the licence.

If you are going to spend money, IPB works out cheaper, as you dont have to renew every year, and you can keep your board.
If you just want a free forum for discussion, phpBB3 is looking quite nice, and it has a lot of the features that vB has and hundreds of mods to add on other features too and all for free.