I'm revisiting an issue that came up for us last year, and was then dropped for more 'urgent' corporate stuff.Our learning technologies team has some autonomy from our Group IT infrastructure. We host our own websites, which IT allows through the firewall subject to very strict and regular security tests.We now have some projects coming up which may present the opportunity to offer some social networking features - particularly profiles and forums - which our Group IT are not likely to offer for some time. We've tried forums in various places before with very little uptake, but these projects may enable us to make them central rather than peripheral.However, and it's a big however, our internal team has very tight (self-imposed) restrictions on technology. I've just come out of a meeting with the guy who runs our network and is responsible for security. He's the one that's enabled us to stand up to Group IT in the past by providing excellent security. I'd picked several applications from Jane's lists to investigate. He has said categorically - no mySQL, no open source and no hosted solutions. He'll reluctantly consider PHP as long as it's linked to a SQL database, but his preference is very much for ASP or ASP.net. I could go into his reasons but it's probably not to the point; I don't think it's likely to change.That seems to rule out most of the free/cheaper applications out there, but I note that there are lots of proprietary systems on offer when you Google, usually pretty expensive 'enterprise solutions'. We have to tread a fine line, as this is just a pilot and we may get severe challenges from IT (who will eventually be promoting Sharepoint for this sort of thing) and internal communications people for 'going too far'; for that reason we don't want to promote this as 'enterprise' nor do we want to spend tens of thousands. At the same time, we have an opportunity to put in place something that might be exactly what's needed at this time and place.Has anyone used or does anyone know about, any of the available SQL/ASP/.net tools for:- profiles, blogs and forums (like Ning and Elgg)?- project collaboration (like BaseCamp)?
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I experimented with all of these a couple of years ago. At that time they were all ok, but ultimately I committed to the apache/php/mysql stack, so they fell of my radar.
Replies
Some ideas;
The first two fail the non-OS test, but are .net/MS SQL apps
Umbraco - http://umbraco.org/
DotNetNuke - http://www.dotnetnuke.com/
The last is a commercial option:
Telligent - http://telligent.com/ - (used to be called Community Server)
I experimented with all of these a couple of years ago. At that time they were all ok, but ultimately I committed to the apache/php/mysql stack, so they fell of my radar.
Barry