Any good alternative for sharepoint ? Ofcourse opensource

Question

We are a small company and would like to have a Content & Doc management (with version control, custom lists, workflow ,alerts,Feeds,blogs,wikis,forums,Good Integrated Search ) features which are most commonly found in SharePoint, we cannt have SharPoint for its Cost,complexity and High maintenance.

Search feature which supports most common doc formats liek pdf,MS Office & Open Office file formats, this is very key since we have lot of legacy stuff in these formats & we need to give ourselves one place from where we can organize & search all our content

Please suggest alternatives for a sharepoint like product

Answer 1

Take a look at Confluence and maybe some of the 37signals offerrings.

Answer 2

• Alfresco
• Mindquarry
• Liferay Social Office

Of course, you have to chose for yourself what best fits your interests.

But I think Alfresco is a very good application.

Answer 3

Why not go for Windows SharePoint Services. It's free, has most of the features you need and can be fully extended.

Otherwise, there's Google Wave, it's still in preview though.

Answer 4

I also see no reason to turn the back on Windows SharePoint Services, which only requires a Windows Server 2003/2008 license. Moreover, you can also get Enterprise Search support for free using Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express, which is essentially WSS plus the MOSS 2007 Enterprise Search Engine (BDC and People search not included). Hence, just install MSS2008 and you got all you need.

Chosing SharePoint will also give you the benefit of a huge community you can turn to for help.

Answer 5

One thing to mention that regardless of initial cost, deployment, complexity and maintenance are all the big costs for an enterprise application like this. These are things you'll have to deal with regardless of your chosen platform.

If you're a Microsoft stack based company (MS Office, Server, Exchange etc.), the real benefit of SharePoint is the integration with the rest of their products, so you might find there's more work (=cost) doing this yourself with another package, rather than just paying up to Microsoft..