Professional online surveys with LimeSurvey.The worldwide leading open source survey software as a professional SaaS solution or as a selfhosted.Funding. Much unlike proprietary offtheshelf software that come with restrictive licenses, opensource software is distributed freely, through the web and in.Black Duck Software and North Bridges survey found opensource software in businesses everywhere, but few are managing it worth a darn.Webdistortion. Intranets in many environments are still alive and well.Regardless of the particular technologies you use within your business, there are plenty of open source and free intranet solutions out there with a plethora of features that developers can use or adapt to fulfil the needs of organisations without reinventing the wheel.Following on from an earlier review of content management system Ive decided to examine and review the featureset of each of the intranet solutions listed below, which hopefully will help you to decide which system to download, deploy or develop upon further.Mind. Touch Core.URL http www. Features URL http www.Written in C Mono.Mindtouch core is one of the most established open source products on the web.Free Open Source Employee Management Software' title='Free Open Source Employee Management Software' />Licensed under the General Public License and written in C it is ranked number 1 in collaboration by Sourceforge.You can choose to setup the product for IIS with the source code or download the VMWare image in one download, which can be run via VMPlayer.For convience I opted for the latter.Its a pretty hefty install.Weighing in at 4.MB odd, its the biggest in size of all the system reviewed here, and the most comprehensive in terms of features.It also has professional endorsement from companies such Mozilla, Microsoft, Intel, Intuit, The Washington Post, EMC, Harvard, Timberland, The US Army and The United Nations.Once youve download the image, and loaded it with VMPlayer, Mindtouch core starts a virtual web server.It took me a while to realise that I needed to jump back to my local machine to get this to run.CtrlAlt jumps back to Windows to allow you to fire up a browser.My own server was available through http 1.The console in the Virtual machine will let you know what its listening on anyway.Once you get that running Mindtouch runs a brief installation procedure working out the admin passwords and what not.A few clicks later and you are into the main system.The first thing that struck me about it, was the speed of editing.There really is no waiting around whilst it saves a page.Attaching images automagically categorises it as an image outputting an appropriate thumbnail in the page whereas other file types are treated just as files.FCKeditor now released as CKEditor is the rich text editor of choice.Which gets my vote Other notable features include extensions which are in essence rich snippets of functionality available out of the box.For example, choosing insert RSS extension allow you to generate a list from an RSS feed.Other extensions include support for Silverlight, Images, Yahoo widget insertion amongst others.There clearly has been alot of thought put into what an extensible system should include.Authentication lets many Intranet solutions down.Not so in this case.Mind. Touch offers not one but NINE authentication providers including support for LDAP, Joomla and Word.Press. Skinning support out of the box is also brilliant.Mindtouch includes a few skins in the default install, which actually are quite visually impressive in their own right.You can of course create your own from CSS and HTML as the code under the hood is also clean as a whistle.Skinning this baby would be a designers dream.Without question this is one of the best Intranet systems here.There really is too many brilliant yet easy to use features within this software.Whilst it is a bit of a monster to get going you only have to play with it for a while to get a feel for its brilliance.PBWiki. URL http www.Features URL http pbworks.Platform Hosted. As youd expect with a company name like the above, PBWiki offers a collaborative wiki like solution for developing an intranet.Whilst it isnt free of charge for business users hobbyists,clubs or those using it for personal use can however benefit from it FOC. Toda Sua Sylvia Day Georgian . It is a hosted solution, and on their home page unsurprisingly the free option is somewhat hidden underneath their commercial offerings.That said however it is definitely one of the cleanest, and easiest to use Wiki systems Ive ever used, and the interface has been well polished.Pages are categorised into Folders and files can also be collated into these.This structure leads to good overall organisation capabilities throughout your intranet, without forcing you down a particular path.The free account offers up to 2.GB of storage, which will take a while to fill if you dont have many files to upload, or can live with translating them into web pages.Again hidden from view, but extremely useful is the developer API which you can find under Settings Advanced settings Developer Interface when you login.This will let you utilise and manipulate the data youve worked hard at inputting into the system in other ways if of course you have the techy hacker skills.Plone. URL http plone.Features URL http plone.Written in. Python.Plone is a content management system built on Zope.Plone is better suited for larger enterprise implementations where there is a large user base and workflow management needed.As such the installer for the program wraps up Zope and Plone in a friendly click and go interface, allowing you to get stuck in without any difficulties.The web server launched on Windows out of the box.Whilst Plone is a content management system at heart and one that I missed in an earlier review, a good majority of its features lend themselves well to Intranets.In particular there are add ins for documents, and security features within the system which allow the pages to be limited to different sub groups.An extensive range of portlets the term Plone uses for plugins are available to provide additional functionality.There is a bit of a learning curve with this one.Dont expect to be able to install and start using straight away.As with most feature rich software, its a case of effort in equals effort out.The documentation is comprehensive, and there is a very active community of users to help you along.If you are thinking of using Plone for an Intranet there are a number of Intranet related tutorials out there to help you along.Glass. Cubes. URL http www.Features URL http www.Platform. Hosted.Touting itself as an online collaborative workspace, Glasscubes provides many features which are perfect for organisations of all sizes.The interface is one of the more polished of all the systems reviewed here, and personally, I found it very easy to use.There are a number of features available out of the box which position it an both as an Intranet and an extensive project management tool.It includes task management, collaborative forums, polls, calendars and user management to mention but a few of the features which positions it as a strong contender in the space.BT have also recently endorsed the product as the preferred supplier for its failed BT Workspace customers to migrate too.The service recently having shut down.Signup was remarkably quick.In fact theres a lesson to be learned for application developers on how low a barrier to entry theyve made the signup process.Quick. Painless. No messing around.I was up and running in about 3.They didnt even force me to confirm my email address.Love that. Pricing for Micro organisations up to 3 users is free, although limited to the below features.Small business users would probably have to go for the 1.Mb storage space for your documentsfiles.Up to 1. 00 contacts in your simple customer relationship management software.Up to 2 secure workspaces.Up to 3 users can access your account.Business Units can be split into Cubes and the appropriate permissions given to each section this allows each of the features within the cubes to be available to the appropriate people.Contacts company wide can be browsed easily, and activity is output to a stream which lets you see activity across the system at a glance.A hosted solution may not suit everyone but a great interface design with the right blend of features makes this one well worth a look.Brushtail. URL http www.Features URL http www.Written in. PHPAn older project, Brushtail is the one man project of David Funnell a developer at Eastern Regional Libraries.Developed in PHP from the ground up it was developed to provide a web portal for library staff to easily access policies and procedures.Lime. Survey the online survey tool.Features tailored to your every need.Explore the vast possibilities you have to create your survey professionally with Lime.Survey. Starting with the inbuilt template editor through to advanced scripting abilities inside of the question editor and the mighty expression manager.However, if some feature you need is missing, you may also submit a feature request.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |