SFD (was Re: [Cialug] Meeting Tonight!)

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 6:11 AM, Todd Walton <tdwalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> * MediaWiki as an Intranet
>
> I'd love to see MediaWiki as an Intranet, i.e. do what it does but be
> made over well enough that it wasn't *just* a wiki.

Yes, as someone who works for a company whose intranet is a wiki I can
say that it is not nearly enough. We use Moin instead of mediawiki but
it's just not easy enough to add dynamic content to. You end up having
a dozen separate web apps or you have to enable the HTML() macro so
that you can embed HTML into the page and use google gadgets or
whatever. But that means you either have to prevent people from
editing the page (defeats the purpose of the wiki) or give everyone
the HTML() macro (security problems).

For someone else I set up trac + pastebin + webdav and that worked
very nice. But now that I know more about Drupal I can do all of that
in one application. See http://rockclimbr.com/ for an example where
some people recreated basecamp in Drupal. A benefit of this is that it
would integrate with openid or ldap for single signon and give you a
wiki, file sharing, todo lists, project management and teams.

By the way, two open source applications I have recently seen that
provide some great value are:

 * http://www.orangehrm.com/ - Human resource management
 * http://www.openerp.com/ - Open source ERP

Having done consulting programming in the past I know the value of ERP
and I unfortunately know the cost. There are a lot of organizations
stuck in the "MS Access is too small but MAS90 is too big" category
who could benefit from a product that is easy to customize with either
in-house talent or per-project consulting. Getting rid of the high
licensing fees would give an organization the option to tinker and
scratch their own itch with a relatively low risk and low level of
commitment.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, identi.ca and twitter