What are the options for free intranet hosting?

May 10, 2011 8:18 AM

The company I work for is moving its data storage and processing to the cloud—with the exception of the intranet (which the company’s currently paying to be hosted). There’s a feeling that the intranet should be kept separate from the company’s other documents. What are the options for free intranet hosting? Does such a thing even exist? The current system is very basic, and we really just need 200-300 files (Word, Excel, pdf) to be available in simply displayed categories in an area accessible by staff. Any suggestions?
posted by hot soup girl to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Google Docs is a possible solution - Word and Excel files are reasonable matches for the Google Docs formats, and you can organize them in a variety of ways. Google Apps isn't free for large groups of people, though -- IIRC you have to pay for it if you have more than 25 or so people.

Realistically, individuals can find a lot of interesting free options but organizations don't have as many alternatives that I'm aware of.
posted by verb at 8:29 AM on May 10, 2011

Dropbox?
posted by rocketpup at 8:34 AM on May 10, 2011

I was about to suggest both Google Docs and Dropbox, but was beaten to it.
posted by maybeandroid at 8:52 AM on May 10, 2011

I didn't get a feel for the size of the organization, but Google docs may not scale well for a medium-sized organization (~150-800 employees), not to mention security issues. If you have an unused machine lying somewhere, you can run a wiki without great difficulty (permissions to edit are easy to setup too).

If it is a MS shop, Sharepoint is a great option as well.
posted by theobserver at 9:04 AM on May 10, 2011

2nd for Sharepoint if you are a Microsoft shop. WSS (Windows Sharepoint Services) is free with Server 2007 and allows building simple sites to house announcements, calendar items and documents.
posted by johnn at 9:47 AM on May 10, 2011

The tricky part is handling revisions: you have to trust your users to re-upload the files each time you edit them, and even then what if two people change the same document at the same time? Sharepoint integrates with Office in a way that makes this automatic.
posted by miyabo at 5:26 PM on May 10, 2011

Thanks for your help, folks!
posted by hot soup girl at 6:19 AM on May 11, 2011