A Conservative Techie

In another post (http://jjesse.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/sharepoint-versus-worpdress/), I spoke about problems and concerns I have had trying to come up with a nice content management system to help replace what we currently are using at work. I wanted to provide an update as to where I currently am on and how the project is currently standing. An amazing part of my last blog entry was one of the dotProject core contributors made some comments about helping out which was nice, including recommending a different product then using dotProject to meet ourrr needs.
I spent some time with MediaWiki, Drupal, Alfresco, and finally came back to WordPress. I created a test virtual machine running on my Kubuntu box and started playing around with it. I found all kinds of cool themes, plugins and other unnessecary junk to loadx into my wordpress setup. Finally I found what I was really looking for, post levels. The ability to set a level to a post and only those with higher access could see the post. Beacuse the information posted here will be specific to the company, I have setup each post with a default level of 1 and a person has to then sign in to view the post. A question I still have is how secure is the password settings behind this?
I am not too concerned about theming the site, unless I want to brand it based on the colors and everything of the company, but right now I’m pretty happy with how things look.
I like the fact that I create categories for each post and then do a quick and easy search by limiting to just the categories I want. If the topic is Client Management, then I want to see all Client Management related posts, Asset Management, Asset Management posts, etc… A thought I haven’t tried to figure out is can I first limit by Client Management and then Design Documents to only show Client Management Design Documents.
Another thing I am enjoying working with WordPress is the ease to setup and get working with page rank and uploading files. I took a look at Alfresco based on recommendations and it looked great, including file versioning, but the setup was way complex. In fact more complex then the last time I looked at Sharepoint. Am I missing something in the setup of Alfresco? I had to do a lot of configuration and customization that I didn’t have to do in WordPress. Another point that bothers me about Alfresco is you are required to run a GUI to get things to work correctly. In fact I couldn’t figure out how to install without a GUI to even test to see if it was possible. Any install documents are “hidden” behind a wall of create a username and password to sign in to see them. (That turns me off from using a product.) To setup wordpress I simply installed Ubuntu 7.04 server using the LAMP installer and downloaded the wordpress install, unziped and untarred and was ready to go with a few simple steps. No GUI required. I use phpmysqladmin because I like it, but outside of that, nothing was requried. Simple and easy to do.
So I’m now at the point to do a demo of what I’ve created after I have populated the database. Hopefully what I present can help ease the transfer from dotProject to WordPress.

For those that read this site, I’m looking for some help on setting things up for a local wordpress install I’m working on. I would like to set my local wordpress install so that not all posts are available for all people.
So if I create a group called Asset Team, then I only people who are a part of the Asset Team would be able to view the post/entry. If I set it to everyone, then everyone would be able to view the bpost. How would I go about setting that up?

Ok I’m looking for a documentation/team management system that I can setup and run. I’ve used Sharepoint and obviously this blog is hosted on WordPress. I have even installed a local WordPress server and have successfully enabled a blog.
Let me explain the situation here: At work right now we run dotProject to manage some of the documents the consultants use. But not many people use and it is very hard to search and find files, including the files you have posted yourself. Also since we are not using the project management functions the site is a little more then a file repository that no one uses.
I’ve been tasked to find some form of a solution to this. The first thing I thought had was to use Sharepoint as I have used it for team sites and documentation management. 99% of the engineers here use Microsoft Office, so I thought it would be a great fit. However there are some issues security wise, including the biggest being required VPN access to really get the best out of Sharepoint which at most client sites is blocked.
So I thought what about setting up a WordPress site, but I don’t know enough about WordPress to see if it will work the way I want it to. I would like to be able to create seperate “sites” for different projects or teams and upload documents, have discussion, and great search. Also different levels of access control would be great, so if I didn’t have the correct access, I wouldn’t even see the post.

Am I looking for too much out of wordpress and should be looking for something else, some other form of software???