What software would you recommend for an Intranet Portal/Forum?

Question

In search of software to implement a Portal for my area (OS Image Deployment) were I can publish Image Releases, Documentation and an area to offer support (forum). The plan it eliminate all email/phone interaction and point all of my users to the portal site. Active Directory Authentication would be a plus but not necessary.

I tried Drupal with the Forum plug-in, but I think I need a more on the Forum side.

I'm currently looking at:

• Wordpress + bbPress
• myBB which includes a portal
• Wrodpress + phpBB

I'm also considering DocuWiki for the documentation (and possibly for announcements on the front-page)

What software would you recommend and do you think Wordpress pages would be enough for creating documentation?

BTW, this project is pretty much me trying to improve my workflow and interaction with my internal users which means I have a budget of $0

Answer 1

I would choose wiki + forum.

Reason for wiki is:
Keeping the work to edit the documentation to a minimum, while still having a system that can host many pages easly.

Regarding what forum/wiki to choose i would take the following into consideration
1) Bugdet - If you can spend some money i would buy one of the big once like VB.
2) What your current enviroment runs on, if you have windows servers and mostly MS SQL servers i would choose one that runs on this.

As for wiki software if you run a windows enviroment, look at ScrewWiki both run on windows servers fine and has plugin support for AD integration.

Answer 2

If you want an enterprise class portal, I'd recommend Liferay.

Liferay Portal is an enterprise web platform for building business solutions that deliver immediate results and long-term value. Get the benefits of packaged applications and an enterprise application framework in a single solution.

Answer 3

I like ikiwiki for its design. It's a "wiki compiler" which can use popular distributed version control systems as the backend.

So, it's nice for maintaining documentation, and for sites that don't really need to serve dynamic content intensively, which is often the case for intranet community sites.

Running it is simple. A webserver serving an ikiwiki site is a quite simple thing since ikiwiki compiles into static content: so, little effort in administrating it, easy mirroring, or easy moving of the site to another server (+ easy offline editing of the content due to the use of a VCS backend).

It's used on the sites of a few well-known software projects, for example, GNU Hurd, DragonFly BSD, xcb.freedesktop.org and more (see http://ikiwiki.info/ikiwikiusers/).