Document management system behind the firewall

Question

Some of my colleagues like to use Word and Excel documents for all communication. There is very little chance of changing that. The major frustration is when multiple people need to edit the documents and there are many versions "floating" around - its a nightmare. Normally I would recommend Google docs or Dropbox but I work at a very large financial organization and there is no way they will let anything sit on servers outside their direct control. So I'm looking to set something up on one of my servers, hopefully something open source that supports at least:

• Document access control
• Locking
• Versioning
• Comments on documents
• Cross platform Mac/Windows/Linux

But I've never done this before so I was wondering if anyone out there had a good solution we can deploy behind the firewall.

Answer 1

Something I played around with before landing on Sharepoint for our needs internally (you get a free foundation licence with a Windows SBS 2010 box) was Alfresco.

Looked pretty powerful, configurable and probably meets most of your needs outlined in OP. There was a free, open-source community edition which I downloaded and setup on a real lowspec linux server for testing.

From memory it's PHP and Java-based, accessed through a browser and also allows OS shell integration. Looks as though they now also have a native iOS application (and are recruiting for Android developers currently) .

Answer 2

If you are a Windows shop, Sharepoint is you best chance. Otherwise, I would say that you can use SVN.