I am exploring the options of establishing a wiki site for my company's division of developers, numbering over a hundred. We are a pure Microsoft (Certified Partner) shop, so it is natural to base an implementation on ASP.NET and IIS for familiarity's sake as well as extended learning opportunities.
It looks like Screwturn wiki does not offer a user provider that can hook up to Active Directory. Is there a wiki engine that natively supports AD? Managing two user bases would not be the most efficient of activities when we wish to control access.
UPDATE: looks like ScrewTurn now has an official AD provider
http://www.screwturn.eu/blog/?p=255
Have you had a look at Sharepoint Wiki? Sicne you are a Microsoft shop, it's probably the easiest to set up.
As expected, it integrates with Active Directory out of the box. It's not really written about much since it's part of Sharepoint Server. Here's the Microsoft Page
To be honest, it's not the greatest Wiki around. The markup is HTML based, which is clunky coming from MediaWiki, but It fit in nicely.
The N2 Open Source ASP.NET CMS is a lightweight CMS framework to help you build great web sites that anyone can update. It contains a package of functional templates with News, Wiki, Photo Galleries, FAQs, RSS, Data Entry, Polls and more. Also, N2 leverages on ASP.NET features such as existing web controls site map and membership providers.
We've been using Perspective Wiki - it integrates with Windows AD fairly well, and has most of the features you'd expect of a wiki - which is more than could be said for the SP Wiki - we've not migrated to MOSS wiki's yet mostly because of missing features.
MindTouch is OpenSource and .Net based. Ohloh has rated it as a 5. The source code is pretty tight, and there are connectors for SqlServer as well as a scripting language. Finally it supports LDAP and ActiveDirectory.
MindTouch is a generally considered a good open source alternative to SharePoint as you can quickly create customizations with it's toolkits as well as integrate with MS Office.
According to their website LiteWiki supports the ASP.NET membership providers and is pretty lightweight.
It might not be what you are looking for but my compnay has MediaWiki on Linux/Apache running with integrated AD security. It is locked down to users in a particular AD group and we log on with our AD credentials.
MediaWiki seems to be a very good wiki too.
You can add AD support with a couple line of code. Check the Screwturn wiki forums for various examples
Related
I know this question has been tossed around by many developers and designers. I just got finished with my companies intranet site using joomla 1.5 with a custom bulit template and modifying almost everything in joomla. It got me thinking if I should be using an enterprise CMS instead of an free open source CMS. I almost went with wordpress, but the company wanted joomla for there site. It was a great for me to jump into another CMS and learn, but is there a better CMS out there that meant for intranet or does it really matter at all?
Try OpenAtrium, its free.
http://www.openatrium.com
If you're planning an intranet project using a CMS, then you'll need to clarify a couple of requirements before choosing the right one. I have a blog post with some simple choices for choosing a cms for an intranet, more specifically on collaboration and community features. But other more basic requirements are:
Is there a technology stack that the organization prefers/uses? Does it need to be on-premise or cloud based? This will filter down the candidates
Is the Intranet for just posting read-only notices and information, or are community features (groups, lists, news feeds, etc)
Does the Intranet require SSO so that organization members can seamlessly interact with content based on their identity?
What sort of budget is available for the Intranet? All CMS installs have a cost, even the ones without any subscription cost.
Is document and file management an important requirement?
Are customizations needed for any specific Intranet functionality or connectivity to other systems?
Wordpress will do a simple intranet well, but will start to become more work if you start getting complex requirements around authentications, groups and social functionality. If on the LAMP stack and looking for more complex requirements, look at Drupal or Joomla. On the Windows/.NET side there have been suggestions in this answer already - the choices span from full commercial answers such as Sharepoint to those available open source and commercially licensed like Dnn.
Nowadays everything is called a CMS - tools to maintain websites, advanced portals, wiki's, and so on. The requirements for a "CMS" are drastically different for intranets and public websites, however.
Intranets usually have a high level of interaction, lot's of user generated content, different content types, and so on. More users need to be able to login to the system (basically everyone, not just the content editors) with different levels of authorization and different roles in general. Collaboration in general is much more important than with an average "public" CMS based website.
Furthermore you will usually want different types of plugins. Google analytics and SEO are much less important, you'd be more interested in some active user plugin, recent publications, integration with other internal tools (i.e. project management) and possibly exposing other datasources (databases, telephone directories, filesystems with internal documents), and so on.
In my personal experience, Plone is a good choice. It provides most of the above out of the box or through existing extensions and it has excellent integration possibilities with external systems. Cyn.in also provides a somewhat completer plone based solution.
If Plone's too much for you, you could consider some wiki-like system, such as TWiki or MediaWiki
As others have said, it will depend on your requirements.
If you are looking for something more in the enterprise space, then elcomCMS might be a good fit - it's .NET based though (not sure if that rules it out in your case), but has an API and other dev considerations.
Pretty strong as both a web CMS and an intranet.
http://www.elcomcms.com/Product/elcomCMS-Overview/Intranets
I have user long time drupal, but now I switching to WordPress it's much easier, if you don't want to create a community or something like this.
Recently Microsoft (via Scottgu) has announced some new technologies (WebMatrix, ASP.NET Razor, IIS Developer Express, SQL Server Compact Edition). I think this is something new direction in which Microsoft is trying to move since launching of ASP.NET MVC. I think the clear target of these new moves are Ruby/Python/PHP/.. developers or current ASP.NET developers who are thinking to move to Ruby/Python/PHP.
What's your opinion?
Will Microsoft be successful in its objective?
The objective is clearly to lower to bar of entry for new developers. Getting a .Net-based website has never been easier and by adding the PHP support they can tempt PHP developers by offering a familiar face in a new environment.
I think this will unleash a new wave of developers discovering .Net web development.
I disagree that WebMatrix is only useful for not-particularly-programmers or novice developers. It is (especially that Razor thing) incredibly useful for developing "one-liner" websites of non-production quality (e. g. to demonstrate some feature or just to provide a test web service for programmer's needs).
I hadn't used WebMatrix enough yet, but it already seems that I can create 50% of a simple web calculator before VS2010 even starts up :-)
Seems to me that its substantially aimed at people who are not particularly programmers - web development for SuperUser.com perhaps? (c.f. the link to Scott Hanselman's blog in my comment to the question) And who don't necessarily want to be "developers" but do want to have some capabilities to go beyond plain HTML.
Its also aimed at demonstrating that there is a complete stack and further that you can deploy applications using that stack to shared hosting without incurring additional costs (which is a new feature enabled by the new release of SQL Server Compact Edition)
Last its an entry point for those who might want to be developers - if you're talking about "developing" a website or a web application its not always the case that the programming involved is complicated
Without playing - I need to set up a VM so I can play in a sandbox - its hard to go further but WebMatrix is composed of a number of very capable tools and therefore offers considerable potential to develop apps beyond what is possible "out of the box".
Their goal:
Simplify and court new developers.
Will they be succesfull:
This seems to me one of the easiest ways to get out a website so I don't see how this can fail.
In response to catbert's comment about WebMatrix being useful for non-production quality sites, I'd like to point out that Rob Conery and Scott Hanselman used WebMatrix to create their This Developer's Life podcast site. Which is not a heavy duty commercial production site, but is definitely not a demo site.
We have library website written in classic ASP that allows to browse and search by multiple (50+) filter criterias (author, publication year, ISSN ... ). There are lots of security holes and we have only one developer who hardly maintain this ASP-site with some minor features for last 3 years.
There are two common user groups - administrators (librarians) and students (5000+) who have books on hands and search for them.
We don't want to rewrite site from scratch, just to use standard free CMS (.net based) and migrate library data and user accounts with minimum effort. What CMS will you suggest?
What do you think of SharePoint? It has out-of-the-box Visual Studio 2010 support so it looks promising (but we have no experience with this CMS)
Thank you in advance.
I have used DotNetNuke in the past and was pretty satisfied with it. Another one to try is Umbraco. Also, this Wikipedia article has a huge list of CMS systems broken down by language and cost.
SharePoint Foundation (formerly SharePoint Services) could certainly be customized to meet your needs. However, its learning curve will be much steeper than some of the other options mentioned, and it doesn't sound like you would use enough of its features (collaboration, document management, etc) to justify that additional cost.
MojoPortal. Free .net based CMS. More Info.
Use Dotnetnuke. It has years of development effort a lot of lot plugin modules and a vibrant community.
Is there an open rbac framework for asp.net? there a few solutions for rails but i cant find a simple rbac system for asp.net. is there something that can be used and extended?
This article looks like a good place to start (it is best to drill into the links the author references for more information, but make sure that you read the article as well):
Implementing RBAC on .Net:
Recently I worked on RBAC (Role based
access control) implementation within
.Net. A comprehensive work on this
topic is done by Mark Strembeck XoRBAC
Home Details on RBAC concept can be
found at NIST RBAC
While the design approach given in
Strembeck's work was comprehensive
enough to be realized on .Net, the
default implementation (done on XoTcl)
used extensive patterns from the
language (e.g. ability to use an
object as a class!), so a quick port
of that to a complete .Net
implementation of the design would
have taken a bit of an effort in my
current project. Well, instead of then
implementing the solution, I selected
MS Authorization Manager (I know folks
will say, Dah... that would have been
a no brainer). This is a small library
and a management console prrovided on
Windows 2003 and 2000 that implements
most of the RBAC requirements.
Maybe I've missed the point here, but ASP.NET ships with a pretty robust Role Provider framework - it should be very easy to find many open source implementations, if you really don't want to use the implementation that it comes with.
A comprehensive article on RBAC was found on RBAC Wikipedia. Instead of researching on how to implement the features mentioned in the article, I tried to find security framework which allows a non-technical guy like me to apply security on asp.net applications and found following frameworks:
Portal Guard
Visual Guard
Member Protect
Ok, i have done a bunch of asp as well as asp.net right when it came out. A friend is starting a non profit organization and he wants me to put together a site for him. I figured i would kill 2 birds with one stone and look to freshen up my skills on the latest that the web has to offer in asp.net, web 2.0, etc.
The site requirements are pretty simple:
Organization mission statement
Users ability to register
Photos, content
Blog posts
Ability to donate directly on the site (maybe through paypal)
So my questions is what are the best tools to start here given its going to be hosted on windows ASP.net platform 3.5. Any other frameworks that i should be looking at.
Where is the best place to start?
I could easily build the site just putting a table together and a bunch of static pages but i figured if it made sense to utilize and help freshen my skills, it would be worth the efforts of the learning curve.
Feel free to suggest any other items that i haven't listed.
Have a look at ASP.Net MVC and JQUERY also take a look at S#Arp as a nice platform to build your site upon. It setups ASP.Net MVC, with nHibernate and has really good guidance on a good DDD structure.
In case you've overlooked it, The AJAX Control Toolkit -
addresses three needs. First it gives website developers a place to get components to make their web applications spring to life, second it gives a set of great examples for those wishing to write client-side code, and third it is a place for the best script developers to get their work highlighted.
For an open source functioning CMS system, look at N2. N2 is a lightweight CMS framework to help you build great web sites that anyone can update. The user interface is intuitive and empowering. The developer story is something quite exquisite.