Hi René

This may sound like heresy around here, but I don't think Umbraco is suited for that. Umbraco does co-exist nicely with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, which is what we use for this. WSS has much richer collaboration features. So we're using WSS for collaboration, and Umbraco for web content management. They run in separate web applications, so there's good isolation. It's not to say Umbraco can't do it, but these features are ready to use with WSS.

WSS has a number of excellent pre-built templates you can download, including bug tracking, project management, task lists (todo), knowledge base etc. Many of these incorporate workflow, so that when a bug is assigned to an individual, it automatically gets added to their task list.

If you go with WSS, you can launch it today; out of the box it does everything you want. It's all very customizable. I've been exploring ways to integrate the two, so that content from the intranet/extranet can be published into Umbraco, but don't have anything solid yet.

If you want to poke around with it, send me an email and I'll set you up with a temporary login on our client extranet. I have some of these templates set up, and you can play with them. But you don't really need me. WSS 3.0 is a free download (it runs on your Windows server license), and if you set up a virtual machine and do a single box install, you'll be up and running in no time. You'll also have to download the 40 application templates that can be added to it. Don't bother with the GroupBoard template, though--it's buggy.

Regards,
Mike Sharp

rdcpro is my username,
Hotmail is my email provider.

Hi Mike,

thanks for your hint about wss. But i've got two problems. I've no experience with wss, but that's not really a problem. Second, my boss told me not to use wss :(. My job is to create such a system from scratch. My current opinion is to use umbraco as a wrapper to manage pages, users and small kind of stuff and to implement the project management as a set of usercontrols that are out of the scope of umbraco. Umbraco acts just as the host. But i'm very interested in the wss solution that you told about. It would be nice if you can provide me a login to have a look at it.

Thanks

René

Hi,

I mostly agree with Bob but you have to consider how much data your solution will generate.

Usually I do the implementation as Bob describes it because it's a super way of creating very feature rich webapps in no time. I've created medium sized intranet solutions this way with great success.

But theres a limit on how much content you can put into Umbraco and therefore you have to consider how much data (nodes) your solution will contain. The alternative is a SQL based solution. Create the tables for the external content, develop an extension library enabling xslt to access data, custom usercontrols for all forms.

You might end up developing som action handlers for automating content placement, references between items, access configuration on content, creation og members and groups ..


Kindly,

Jesper

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webbureau jesper.com doing webdesign / development / umbraco implementations / 2007&2008 MVP