CMS for office project

It's a frequent request. Firstly, the answer depends on a couple of things: is it for one team - and are they a distributed team or close-knit; or is it for two or more teams. And, is the person who is to run the CMS tech-savvy or not really into all this?

I guess the second part of that is the most important as it affects your server set-up. If the central admin person (let's call them the sysadmin) is OK with all this, then you should install a local server package like XAMPP, then a PHP CMS will work well. If they are not happy with that kind of thing, then a one-click solution of some kind is called for.

Using the XAMPP server method you can run most CMS. You'll probably be looking at a free solution, if it's for a small team and your first go at this.

If it's for one closely-knit team then CMS-MadeSimple will do. Otherwise, Joomla is a bit more solid. That will work fine as long as there is only one team project running. I'd probably go with Joomla for this because it will do more in the long run, when you find other uses for it.

Drupal is maybe the best bet in PHP CMS for multi-team use. But - it's very hard to handle for newcomers. I would actually recommend Plone over it for this, as it's going to be on a local machine (one you have access to).

Also Plone is just a one-click Windows install, server included, no XAMPP needed. You can't get much simpler than that. Running it for multiple teams, with full use of the ACL, won't be a walk in the park for a newbie but that would apply to anything with full ACL. Plone is strangely appropriate for a quick 'n simple intra-office job, considering it is OK for mega web publishing jobs. You don't have to worry about templates or anything at first.

Your sysadmin will have a hard time for a couple of weeks but it's all downhill after that.

Oh, sorry, you mentioned Wordpress. Well, that's OK for simple text publishing but terrible where structured page storage is needed - and that's what you need in a project. Like: a specifications section; current progress docs section; R&D or sales input stuff; whatever. You can keep all those pages nicely organised in a CMS, in a dozen different ways. With Wordpress you'll crash inside a week, unless you get an expert in to expand it. Even then it's a poor choice, it isn't designed for this.

Maybe someone else has a favourite office CMS.