Is there an OpenSource Product that can provide the services as MS Sharepoint?

Have a look @ sourceforge.net:

http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_...rds=sharepoint

I have been looking at

http://www.scalix.org

http://www.zimbra.org

http://www.citadel.org

http://www.kolab.org/

Try Plone. This is an open source CMS that has similar features to sharepoint such as versioning etc.

Alfresco seems to cover this kind of area. AFAIK, Alfresco and Plone are the only products that can provide a document repository as a shared network drive to Windows clients (in addition to the standard Web interface).

Having worked with SharePoint a little and Plone quite a bit. In my opinion, Plone is lacking in functionality compared to SharePoint. Yes it has versioning and such. But I found it very hard to grasp at first (I still ask myself why do they do it this way). May be it is me, but SharePoint offers so much more if you are on a Windows network.

PS - I am not a SharePoint fan by a long shot.

I looked at Alfresco Just before we started experimenting with Sharepoint and it looks like the closest thing you'll find. I have not used it, just did a couple hours of reading on it. Also remember it is free, they offer support, they have a online trial, you can run it on Linux and you are not locked into mandatory updates. I did try to get my boss to look at it. I guess once you dance with the devil, you can't go back.

I looked into Sharepoint briefly, and it looked really cool, but the actual implementation kept triggering my gag reflexes to the extent that I couldn't bring myself to go further. Apart from the issue of locking your data into a proprietary repository and file formats (and potentially locking your clients to Windows), from the perspective of a Web developer the architecture and the development process just seemed really awful. I could see that business users might enjoy building stuff with the Designer and running sites, and get a lot of benefit, but I couldn't imagine supporting it or writing extensions for Sharepoint myself.