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I've got some experience in the field as a consultant for a similar product called Alfresco, and I can see why it is such a big success. If there is anything that is much better, I haven't seen it yet.

So: what collaboration tool would you suggest for the average corporate drone to use? And no, git is not an acceptable answer.

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>> So: what collaboration tool would you suggest for the average corporate drone to use? And no, git is not an acceptable answer.

Email + shared folder (as flat as possible) with rigorously enforced naming conventions. Clever features like search can be added with crawlers.

For me that would suffice - but its not the answer, I'm afraid. Management/IT wants to:

- have workflows, so documents can be approved among other stuff

- have document lifecycle, so they expire and must be reviewed after time x

- solve the Dropbox problem - how do you collaborate with external entities without compromising security by having users uncontrollably put stuff on Dropbox, because there is no other way?

- have automatic versioning

- be able to checkout/lock a file during editing

These are just a few aspects. You can do most if this by gluing stuff together yourself, but these are the constraints:

- be able to achieve all this with semi-competent IT staff

- seamless integration into the existing Windows infrastructure is a big plus

- be able to blame someone else if something goes wrong

So - what do you propose?

It is interesting how all these problems come down to basic CS concepts (cache invalidation, naming things, locks).

- Versions

"Doc-456 V-023" "Doc-456 V-024"

To maintain an archive files become read only after 24 hours.

- approvals

"Doc-456 V-024 Joe Bloggs ✔"

The problem with the semi-competent IT staff is that they are not immune to Microsoft's BS^H^H PR. They will really believe what the account manager told the CIO over dinner.

I hear good things about Alfresco. I have a lot of experience with Plone, which is also a very good foundation for a corporate intranet. I've deployed it countless times in this scenario, as well as the back-end of public-facing websites.