Umbraco - Setup a CMS in your Company for free

If you have to setup a documentation system in your company Umbraco CMS is a very good solution.

Umbraco is an open source CMS written in ASP.NET , it works with IIS (Internet Information Services) and with Sql server Express, of course if works in Windows XP/2003/Vista.
In the market there a a lot of CMS open source, but Umbraco has some very good features:

- The interface is very user friendly, it uses a lot of JavaScript and permits to do a lot of thing in an easy way.

- You can create a master page of your website

- You can create documents that uses that master page. In each document you can add the fields (meta-data) that the user has to input, for each field you define the type of control and if it is mandatory or not.

- You can integrate your pages with xsl macros. The macro are quite easy to implement. In my case i have created a search that was looking inside some of my fields for the information.

- The system permits to define the users roles, to have documents revisions, send document to translation and other interesting features.

- The program shows in two different pages the documents and the images, you can create a different folder structure without problems.

A feature that I like is the possibility to use Microsoft Live Writer or Microsoft Word 2007 to edit the documents directly from your computer. It permits to save images in a very easy way.

The new version 4 also has a very good feature that permits to edit the website while you navigate.

Also if you are a .net developer you can always add new personalized controls to your website.