Morkai, What you're describing is a situation where the authors of documents and the readers are the same group - one group of experts who wish to share knowledge.
That is the scenario that MS Sharepoint is designed to satisfy. I only have brief experience with it, but it looks good for a small office intranet. Especially as you are already heavily MS based. Depending on your license agreement with MS you may already be covered for it, hence the cost may be v.good. cheers mmmmmRob --- Morkai Kurst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > We have an intranet written in asp.net which > basically displays product > information (prices, pictures etc) for our sales > staff. > > One of the problems we are beginning to encounter is > that we pride > ourselves on our technical knowledge of the products > we sell, but > business is picking up and we are having to hire > more staff to take > calls. We have realised we need to build some sort > of knowledge base to > help the new staff. > > We came up with an idea for range guides (showing > the history of a > particular manufacturers range) and tech notes > (which is where staff can > put all the known problems with a product and how to > fix it etc.) > > I originally set these up as static html documents > that got searched via > index services - It was fine until I realised I > (being the only web > designer) just didn't have time to do this as well > as take the sales > calls and run the warehouse. (We are a small family > business) > > I saw the anacronym 'cms' being bandied about on my > .net lists and > finally took a look - I still only have a fairly > vague idea of just what > a cms is (if anyone can point to a cms for dummies > guide I'd be > grateful) but in my travels I came across Ektron and > their $500 CMS100. > > http://www.ektron.com/cms100.cfm > <http://www.ektron.com/support/cms100_support.cfm> > > Having taken the 'test drive' it seems to be pretty > much what we want - > basically a way to allow our other staff to add or > correct information > to these guides with no knowledge of html. I want > something that can be > accessed from our intranet but that isn't a > collection of word documents > (which was one suggestion in the office) A lot of > our products link > together so these guides need to show those links as > well (hence the > desire for html) It also needs to be searchable. > > The price is the crutial factor - $500 we can afford > but not much more. > We run on pure MS systems Small Business Server, and > are about to move > over to SQL server from Corel Paradox. > > What I'm basically asking is > > 1) Does anyone have any experience of Ektron? > > 2) Is there anything else that will work in the > dotnet environment at an > affordable price > > 3) Am I barking up the wrong tree completely or is a > cms our ideal > solution? > > I thought about making our own and have ordered > 'Real-World ASP.NET: > Building a CMS' but a not sure if it's worth the > effort so to speak. For > what Ektron offer is that a good price or should it > be fairly easy to > roll something similar myself? > > Hope I'm making some sense, I feel like I'm opening > doors in the dark > here :) > > Thanks in advance > > Morkai > > > > --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- > multipart/alternative > text/plain (text body -- kept) > text/html > --- > -- > http://cms-list.org/ > trim your replies for good karma. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus � Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
