question I need a CMS for company internal documents and procedures: Recommendations?

[MaxBurn]

I need your thoughts on something I can kludge together to contain documents and procedures for technicians in a small business environment (60). These are the three on my mind but I'm willing to look at anything.

Wiki
-Seems available and decent choice for a CMS
-I'm not sure if I could maintain it on the back end but never tried.
-free

vBulletin like this site here
-Love using vBulletin sites
-Sort of kills two birds with one stone, we would now have a place for our techs to interact which has been asked for
-Not sure how hard it is to maintain, backups and fixing problems etc?
-$? not sure that's a concern

Microsoft Sharepoint
-used this at another company and it worked
-ran into weird problems when we moved out of its comfort zone doing things it isn't meant for like storing files

One HUGE advantage; for the moment at least the site will only be visible inside the network and won't be exposed to the big bad internet. Hoping that will protect us from security issues though we won't have anything too secret on the site. Though it would be super nice if the system lent itself to being able to face the public internet for convenience sake in the future if we wanted to.


Background:
At my last company I wrote and organized a lot of internal procedures and documentation. There we had a custom CMS that someone else was responsible for. I do NOT want to go the custom route, the system needs to be maintainable by me. I'm not afraid to RTFM and edit config files but if I have to debug some code things are going to go badly. Small amount of experience in Microsoft SQL and MySQL, even less in PostgreSQL.

Now at my new job I'm doing much the same but now I run the CMS. At the moment it is a super simple HTML put together in notepad running on Nginx because it was quick and easy. Right now honestly it looks bad and while easy to maintain I'm the sole gateway to getting information on it, there is zero collaboration and stuff is going to get hard to find quick.

 

[CougTek]

Have you considered Joomla? I've never used it, but heard it mentionned several times. It's supposed to be easy to maintain. There's a lot of support for it too.

 

[MaxBurn]

I hadn't but I think I like it from the looks of the example sites they list.

 

[Chewy509]

If you're a MS dedicated environment, (AD, MS Office, Exchange), the Sharepoint is hard to look past due to it's integration with AD and Office. IIRC, Sharepoint itself is free, provides wiki functionality, forums, file repositories, etc, however it's search functionality is sh*t without add-ons... (and those add-on's are $$$$$).

However if integration with other solutions is not a requirement, then Joomla or wikimedia* should fit the bill. (*wikimedia is the underlying system that wikipedia runs on). Wikimedia only requires a basic LAMP setup and is easy to maintain. The only downside to wikimedia doesn't have forum functionality built-in.

 

[Mercutio]

I deal with Sharepoint for a few customers. It's not bad, but when people have it, it's just like Exchange and they want to use it for everything, which causes me headaches.
I've also discovered that it's easier to fix Sharepoint crap by recovering from backups than trying to figure out what's wrong when something breaks.

I've also got Joomla sites around. I've not had one break, but I've also never found anyone really willing to put one to any sort of use beyond the sort of thing that honestly could've been done just as easily in Wordpress.

 

[Howell]

We use SharePoint as a repository for a searchable collection of word and excel documents. It doesn't work any better for us than when we had the docs stuffed into file folders. I don't really see the point.

Edit: Correction, it does handle multiple users opening the file at the same time better. And as I reread you've already used it so you know all that. My bad.

 

[Howell]

Have you considered google docs? It it's very easy to use, no infrastructure to set up, and easy to share to the internet.

 

[MaxBurn]

Seems we are down on sharepoint for reasons I understand, it was a kludge of an intranet site. We don't use exchange but do use SQL and their VM stuff that I'm not really involved in.

I'm finding myself getting more interested in vbulletin as it seems to kill two birds with one stone, (CMS and BB) plus we should be able to adapt it to external facing with little risk. One of my first thoughts on whitelisting new accounts to one email domain ran into a brick wall it seems, found discussions from years ago and didn't really see an easy fix. Didn't see the feature in their demo version either.

 

[ddrueding]

Whitelisting an entire domain would be the clean way to do it, but what about exporting your entire company e-mail list and bringing all the individual accounts across?

 

[Handruin]

I highly recommend Atlassian's Confluence. I've used it in the past and was one of my more-favorable wiki and cross-team document collaboration and sharing environments. They also have a forum integration if confluence doesn't do exactly what you need.

 

[Handruin]

Seems we are down on sharepoint for reasons I understand, it was a kludge of an intranet site. We don't use exchange but do use SQL and their VM stuff that I'm not really involved in.

I'm finding myself getting more interested in vbulletin as it seems to kill two birds with one stone, (CMS and BB) plus we should be able to adapt it to external facing with little risk. One of my first thoughts on whitelisting new accounts to one email domain ran into a brick wall it seems, found discussions from years ago and didn't really see an easy fix. Didn't see the feature in their demo version either.

Also, if you're really set on vbulletin, it's worth considering alternatives such as XenForo (original vbulletin devs after leaving the shit show which is now vbulletin) or Invision Power Board. Another newer-age option you might consider is Discourse.

 

[MaxBurn]

Whitelisting an entire domain would be the clean way to do it, but what about exporting your entire company e-mail list and bringing all the individual accounts across?

The obvious choice, if there is an automated way to do it. I've also considered having moderated enrollment and just ignoring everyone that didn't have the right domain. Or maybe have one of the newbs create the accounts.

Also, if you're really set on vbulletin, it's worth considering alternatives such as XenForo (original vbulletin devs after leaving the shit show which is now vbulletin) or Invision Power Board. Another newer-age option you might consider is Discourse.

I will definitely look into this. About the only thing attracting me to vbulleting is my years of using them though I have zero mod/admin experience on them. If we can post documents and articles and have a forum where we can bring all the offices together that seems attractive to me.