Open source alternative to Sharepoint lists [closed]

Question

Sharepoint's lists functionality is powerful. Because I don't want all the other functionality of Sharepoint, I have been looking for an alternative (preferrable open source) without much success.

Basically I want to have a platform or web application that:

1. allows us to define custom datatypes (for different kinds of customer products)
2. has the possibility to create views or forms to present to the user for reading, creating or updating the information of the items of a given datatype
3. a ui to setup this configuration is not required but would be nice to have

In an ideal scenario there is an API to get the data out afterwards for further processing.

Answer 1

I have heard of Alfresco (but have not used it) which is a free open source content management system. To address each of your mentioned needed features: 1. It has the ability to add custom content types via XML (http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Step-By-Step:_Creating_A_Custom_Model). 2. I didn't see a lot of support of individual views but generic views can be setup when creating your model 3. Alfresco has provided installation guides for various installation configurations. They require a login to download the guides (http://www.alfresco.com/products/docs/) 4. REST support.

List of Features from 10K view. I would check out all of the features before validating it fits your needs. (http://www.alfresco.com/products/dm/features/)

Answer 2

I share your quest for an open source alternative to sharepoint list functionality. What I like/need about sharepoint is :

• Can import from existing Excel files (removes alot of fear from a customer viewpoint, lots of legacy Excel files out there)
• Can export to Excel format (idem on the fear thing, some customers just need their Excel fix)
• Provides out of the box sorting/filtering
• good pre-defined datatypes and easy to define custom datatypes
• Makes it easy to define different views and display styles (customers love the preview pane)
• Lists/views can be inserted easily into other webpages/wikipages

I know that jqgrid and http://datatables.net/ gives table/grid editing/sorting/filtering functionality with pre-definedable datatypes but you need to do the backend work ( they give lots of exapmles in PHP).

If I was to define what I'd love to see for internal use in our team it would be :

• Content management via wiki, with semi-decent WYSIWYG as default
• default table/grid/list management with all of the previously listed features

I'd say that if mediawiki/dokuwiki/phpwiki etc. could repackage with WYSIWYG and list handling then the entire planet would just love them for it.

Best regards / Colm

P.S. The only grief I'd have with Alfresco is the sledgehammer/fly metaphor insofar as it provides far more functionality than I require meaning that the overhead for getting up to speed and then maintaining the installation is prohibitive.

P.P.S I also looking at http://www.tiki.org who claim to have "spreadsheet" functionality built in (jquery based).