Sharepoint equiv for Linux

[Darryl Moore]

I was talking to my wife yesterday who was expressing her frustration
with the MS environment she works in. I sounded great to me though. More
unhappy MS customers means more potential Linux customers.

I don't know a lot about MS networks. One of the things I was surprised
to hear is that everybody has to ask the IT department to set up folders
so they can share documents, and that permissions for these folders are
set up on a user by user basis. There does not appear to be any concept
of groups like in Linux.

Since IT is very slow to respond, this means that people in her office
tend to mostly use the Exchange server for document sharing. I.E. email.

One of the ways I wanted to set up a Linux network was to have
department workgroup folders, and within each of these, a designated
dept. person could set up separate project folders and assigned users to
particular groups that would have access to these folders. This would be
a huge improvement for her company and others like it. I could write a
simple GUI utility to give one person easy access to these controls.

The other thing she told me was that they would soon be roling out a
SharePoint server which is suppose to be the holy grail and will
eleviate all their issues. What I understand about Sharepoint is that it
is basically a fancy version control system, and  is very expensive.

Is there any Linux based VCS that I should be thinking about including
to offer the same functionality? Are there any other features of
Sharepoint I should also be looking to offer? Either web based with a
nice AJAX interface, or with some other GUI would be very important.

cheers,
darryl