Sillybean

Yahoo groups alternative

Help.

I run a Yahoo group at work. I inherited it from the creator, who presumably set us up there because while the university offers Listserv, it doesn’t provide us with the other goodies Yahoo offers—calendars, polls, file repositories, etc.

However, one departmental sysadmin with nothing better to do has blocked one of our members, saying he can’t imagine why we’d need to use Yahoo instead of the university’s resources. After I finished rolling my eyes, I went in search of some sort of alternative that we can set up internally. (I would like to get us off Yahoo for reasons having nothing to do with this incident.) We don’t use all of Yahoo’s features; we need:

• Files area
• Link lists (easy enough to do manually if we have to)
• Database (a contact list with customized fields)
• Polls
• Calendar

I would also like to either have a listserve run through this tool, or to have this present a better interface to Listserv’s archives. All the items above should be open to any group member. Ideally, we’d be able to run more than one group using the same software.

So far, phpGroupWare is the best candidate I’ve found. PHProjekt and dotProject are also contenders, but they’re more oriented toward focused project management, while we’re more free-form.

Comments about these tools and other suggestions are more than welcome. I’m pinging the Lazyweb on the off chance anyone’s still reading that.

Update: Mmmm, GeekLog.