Web-based Intranet in Minutes

OverApps Groupware is a free software for Windows, which lets you create a Web-based intranet in a jiffy. It comes with a number of applications such as member's directory, address book, Web directory, news, calendar, project manager, forum and file sharing. This software is available under GPL and is quite easy to install and use. The best thing about it is that it can run on any version of Windows, right from 95 upwards. All it requires is a Web server such as the IIS or personal Web server and a backend database such as Access or MS SQL Server.

We will talk about how to use this software and its features. To check if your IIS is running fine, type http://127.0.0.1/ in your Web browser, and provide the username and password if any (same as you do to log in to your machine). If everything works fine it will open up the IIS help site and the localhost site. 

Copy the zip file, overapps_V1180 from this month's Essential CD to your desktop. The zip file will extract itself to the \desktop\overapps directory, but you can change it if you want. Go to the OverApps folder and copy the contents located in the directory, \Desktop\overapps\InetPub\www root to your Web server's directory, which is usually

C:\Inetpub\wwwroot.

This completes the installation of OverApps. 






To access the OverApps website, type the following address in your browser: http://127.0.0.1/ overapps. This will open a login page. The default username and password are administrator and overapps, respectively. Other users will access it by providing the actual IP address of the machine where overapps is running. You can change the password by going to the administrator link on the home page of OverApps. The OverApps home page consists of lots of features such as calendar, projects and members. There are twelve links, a few being as follows. 

Agenda: To create the agenda for a particular day and time.

Project: To manage your project details, namely project topic, add/remove certain projects, define the team members for a particular project, etc. 

Members: The administrator can create the member user accounts from here, and individual members can access and modify their own profiles.

Contacts: Add/remove/edit different contacts and manage the address book.

Web: Add/remove/edit details of different websites that you want to share with your team. Any intranet member can add and remove sites from here.

News: Post news, presentations, etc, here.

Events: Add/share different events happening or those that will happen in your organization.

Forums: Add and post messages and manage a forum. 

Files: Upload and share files with other members. You can arrange files in folders, give public and private attributes to folders, etc.

About: Consists of different details such as URL, website and e-mail of your company.

Siddharth Sharma