The first thing I would do is to find out exactly what they want and why. Get them to sit down, thing about what they want, and describe it on paper - then justify it with a business case. (That does a reasonable job of weeding out "cool" things that they don't need, but doesn't work well if the non-techy is above you in the chain of command - some jobs just demand you suffer a PHB.)

Try to get them away from the web interface; unless they are working from many different locations it will almost certainly be a lot easier to deal with file uploads by dumping a Samba server on them. You could write a Perl script triggered by Cron to scan the directory for new or updated files every hour and send the emails then (using a prerolled mailing list package).

The system might not be wonderfully integrated - but you'll probably be able to get it running a lot sooner then trying to roll a web community system.

In reply to Re: portals vs wiki by dorward
in thread portals vs wiki by softworkz

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