Free web-based software for team collaboration/documentation
- by Jason Antman
Looking for some advice here, as my search has turned up to be pretty fruitless.
My group (9 people - SAs, programmers, and two network guys) is looking for some sort of web tool to... ahem... "facilitate increased collaboration" (we didn't use a buzzword generator, I swear). At the moment, we have an unified ticketing system that's braindead, but is here to stay for political/logistical reasons. We've got 2 wikis ("old" and "new"), neither of which fulfill our needs, and are therefore not used very often. We're looking for a free (as in both cost and open source) web-based tool.
Management side:
Wants to be able to track project status, who's doing what, whether deadlines are being met, etc. Doesn't want full-fledged "project management" app, just something where we can update "yeah this was done" or "waiting for Bob to configure the widgets". TeamBox (www.teambox.com) was suggested, but it seems almost too gimmicky, and doesn't meet any of the other requirements:
Non-management side:
- flexible, powerful wiki for all documentation (i.e. includes good tables, easy markup, syntax highlighting, etc.)
- good full text search of everything (i.e. type in a hostname and get every instance anyone ever uttered that name)
- task lists or ToDo lists, hopefully about to be grouped into a number of "projects"
- file uploads
- RSS or Atom feeds, email alerts of updates
We're open to doing some customizations (adding some features, notification/feeds, searching, SVN integration, etc.) but need something F/OSS that will run under Apache.
My conundrum is that most of the choices I've found so far fall into one of these categories:
project management/task tracking with poor wiki/documentation/knowledge base support
wiki with no task tracking support
ticketing system with everything else bolted on (we already have one that we're stuck with)
code-centric application (we do little "development", mostly SA work)
Any suggestions?
Or, lacking that, any comments on which software would be easiest to add the lacking features to (hopefully ending up with something that actually looks good and works well)?
