How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"? I guess, wiki for internal stuffs. I'm using Words/Excel files. A chapter (Word) or worksheet (Excel) for different subject or project. You can insert screenshots, tables, etc. Screenshot of installation or picture of DIP switches is way simpler than trying to explaining it in words. You can cut/paste from original documentation. But, I'm curious what others are using. -- William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca>
On Thu, 2020/10/29 10:17:23PM -0400, William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote: | How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"? I guess, | wiki for internal stuffs. We use a wiki for internal stuffs. Have done so across multiple companies for quite a while. I would go mad trying to maintain documentation in word/excel. How do you search across all your files? Across platforms? At my current place, we use dokuwiki, which I find to be a nice combination of features, without a lot of overhead (PHP, files). I even script some reports that insert pages into the wiki nightly. Previously I've used xwiki (java) which was nice, but as it's java, there's a running (sleeping) process all the time. People who wish to spend money (from small to large) like confluence. Confluence is very nice, but it helps if you're already hooked into the Atlassian ecosystem. There are a bunch of alternatives of course, but those are ones that I've found to be good alternatives when I've been looking. Hope that helps, but seriously, set up a wiki. Cheers John
I used DokuWiki a bit at GTALUG website, and I sort of like it. One major problem with Word doc is different people have different writing and formatting styles. With DoKuWiki, at least, formatting will be consistent. But, writing in DokuWiki took a little more effort than Word doc. Maybe, because I'm not used to it. I tried to install DokuWiki a while ago, but couldn't. Obviously, I'll try again. :-) Word has searching, and there is only 1 file. Just lots of chapters. -- William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca> On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 10:38:36PM -0400, John Sellens via talk wrote:
On Thu, 2020/10/29 10:17:23PM -0400, William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote: | How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"? I guess, | wiki for internal stuffs.
We use a wiki for internal stuffs. Have done so across multiple companies for quite a while.
I would go mad trying to maintain documentation in word/excel. How do you search across all your files? Across platforms?
At my current place, we use dokuwiki, which I find to be a nice combination of features, without a lot of overhead (PHP, files). I even script some reports that insert pages into the wiki nightly.
Previously I've used xwiki (java) which was nice, but as it's java, there's a running (sleeping) process all the time.
People who wish to spend money (from small to large) like confluence. Confluence is very nice, but it helps if you're already hooked into the Atlassian ecosystem.
There are a bunch of alternatives of course, but those are ones that I've found to be good alternatives when I've been looking.
Hope that helps, but seriously, set up a wiki.
Cheers
John --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"? I guess, wiki for internal stuffs.
We did this in a small (3-person) team with a largish project. Moved to Mediawiki after a trial with a small, obscure, slightly weird wiki package. It was a big advantage to have a consistent version of the development docs available all the time to whoever needed to check them. Handover was a lot simpler, since the end-user mostly needed a gloss to explain how to navigate the technical docs. Integration with Subversion let us tie the documentation articles right to the relevant source code. Usual caveats -- it all depended on good prose writing. I believe I had some motivation there, because (after we'd got it going) I would start an article to explain the program to myself, before I'd worked out the code. Docs after the fact are always more boring.
I'm using Words/Excel files. A chapter (Word) or worksheet (Excel) for different subject or project. You can insert screenshots, tables, etc. Screenshot of installation or picture of DIP switches is way simpler than trying to explaining it in words. You can cut/paste from original documentation.
That's kind of a scary excess of locality -- especially if you've seen it at scale. That's what the client had been doing before this project tried a wiki. They would be on the LAN thumbing through each others' filesystems looking for things that might be the docs. !!! ... !!!!
On 2020-10-29 10:17 p.m., William Park via talk wrote:
How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"? I guess, wiki for internal stuffs.
When I was at IBM, we used Lotus Notes. However, these days, don't companies use HTML and whatever goes into making web sites? There are a lot of Wikis around that do what you seem to want.
At the Very Large Company that I am currently on furlough with, we've been using Atlassian's Confluence. It is not better than a wiki, but since we're using Jira, the integration with that plus the fact that it's a vendor we already have a relationship with won the day. Any web-based solution with permissions and integration with your communications, ticketing, source control, and calendar solution will be better than a document-based system. If you are small, and you're going to stay small, almost anything works. The ability to add something to the documentation from a client site from your phone should be the minimum usability hurdle. On Fri, 30 Oct 2020 at 09:06, James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 2020-10-29 10:17 p.m., William Park via talk wrote:
How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"? I guess, wiki for internal stuffs.
When I was at IBM, we used Lotus Notes. However, these days, don't companies use HTML and whatever goes into making web sites? There are a lot of Wikis around that do what you seem to want.
--- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
Confusance uses the same search library we did at brainhunter, and it's horrid! There is a chrome add-on that does google-like searches, "Confluence Quick Search". --dave On 2020-10-30 9:44 a.m., William Witteman via talk wrote:
At the Very Large Company that I am currently on furlough with, we've been using Atlassian's Confluence.
It is not better than a wiki, but since we're using Jira, the integration with that plus the fact that it's a vendor we already have a relationship with won the day.
Any web-based solution with permissions and integration with your communications, ticketing, source control, and calendar solution will be better than a document-based system.
If you are small, and you're going to stay small, almost anything works. The ability to add something to the documentation from a client site from your phone should be the minimum usability hurdle.
On Fri, 30 Oct 2020 at 09:06, James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 2020-10-29 10:17 p.m., William Park via talk wrote:
How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"? I guess, wiki for internal stuffs. When I was at IBM, we used Lotus Notes. However, these days, don't companies use HTML and whatever goes into making web sites? There are a lot of Wikis around that do what you seem to want.
--- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain
On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 10:17:23PM -0400, William Park via talk wrote:
How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"? I guess, wiki for internal stuffs.
I'm using Words/Excel files. A chapter (Word) or worksheet (Excel) for different subject or project. You can insert screenshots, tables, etc. Screenshot of installation or picture of DIP switches is way simpler than trying to explaining it in words. You can cut/paste from original documentation.
But, I'm curious what others are using.
Where I work we have some stuff in sharepoint (usually word or excel files), although it seems new stuff tends to go in wiki in teams. I don't think I would recommend either of those. Neither is easy to find stuff in. -- Len Sorensen
William, I did a fifteen month contract at Christie Digital in Kitchener. They maintain a software system called Christie University to provide on-board and upgrade training. They also have a cloud directory where people store notes on stuff. They found the article on my website on Calculating Locational Tolerances. I posted some inspection notes, and one of the other engineers came and asked me where I got my surface finish comparator from, so the stuff was being read. I was impressed. On Thu, 29 Oct 2020 22:17:23 -0400 William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"? I guess, wiki for internal stuffs.
I'm using Words/Excel files. A chapter (Word) or worksheet (Excel) for different subject or project. You can insert screenshots, tables, etc. Screenshot of installation or picture of DIP switches is way simpler than trying to explaining it in words. You can cut/paste from original documentation.
But, I'm curious what others are using. -- William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca> --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca jhowardgibson@gmail.com http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
On 2020-10-29 10:17 p.m., William Park via talk wrote:
How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"? I guess, wiki for internal stuffs.
I'm using Words/Excel files. A chapter (Word) or worksheet (Excel) for different subject or project. You can insert screenshots, tables, etc. Screenshot of installation or picture of DIP switches is way simpler than trying to explaining it in words. You can cut/paste from original documentation.
But, I'm curious what others are using.
I am using two solutions. I am using a script to 'publish' pdfs, images and native html directly through to our internal web a la lighttpd. for odt/word the script uses unoconv to convert odt to pdf. This solution is good for large texts such as photography books. I use dokuwiki for everything else. If I have odt content, I export it as a pdf. You can install the PDF.js dokuwiki plugin to view the pdfs directly from within dokuwiki. Is it just you who will maintain your knowledge base, or will you have to walk others through it too? -- Michael Galea
On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 01:23:23PM -0400, Michael Galea via talk wrote:
I use dokuwiki for everything else. If I have odt content, I export it as a pdf. You can install the PDF.js dokuwiki plugin to view the pdfs directly from within dokuwiki.
Is it just you who will maintain your knowledge base, or will you have to walk others through it too?
I guess, if I'm proposing it, I'll have to maintain it. :-) I'm not talking about massive number of Word/Excel documents, across multiple directories, filesystems, network shares, multiple versions, etc. Our projects are that way, though. We're Microsoft shop. For my need, searching within single file is good enough. Table of content will list the chapters, sections, and subsections. Main problem with "wiki" is the maintenance. Someone has to maintain webserver and database. I barely have time to write the content. I mean, it's good way to learn. But, after a while, you get tired of the hassle. I wish "DokuWiki" was single application, just like Wireshark, Words, Excel, etc. You click it, and you get its frontpage. From there, you write your content, you search, etc. -- William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca>
On 2020-10-30 11:22 p.m., William Park via talk wrote:
On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 01:23:23PM -0400, Michael Galea via talk wrote:
I use dokuwiki for everything else. If I have odt content, I export it as a pdf. You can install the PDF.js dokuwiki plugin to view the pdfs directly from within dokuwiki.
Is it just you who will maintain your knowledge base, or will you have to walk others through it too?
I guess, if I'm proposing it, I'll have to maintain it. :-)
I'm not talking about massive number of Word/Excel documents, across multiple directories, filesystems, network shares, multiple versions, etc. Our projects are that way, though. We're Microsoft shop. For my need, searching within single file is good enough. Table of content will list the chapters, sections, and subsections.
Main problem with "wiki" is the maintenance. Someone has to maintain webserver and database. I barely have time to write the content. I mean, it's good way to learn. But, after a while, you get tired of the hassle.
I wish "DokuWiki" was single application, just like Wireshark, Words, Excel, etc. You click it, and you get its frontpage. From there, you write your content, you search, etc.
I think I should have been more clear in my question. By "maintain", I meant "add content". The last company I used dokuwiki at was full of technical people who were up to the task of learning the wiki markup format, importing media, adding to the hierarchy of the wiki and resolving page-edit collisions. That may be a little more challenging for your users if they are not used to that. I have never had a problem administering dokuwiki other than the usual installation wrinkles. And the fact that the content is stored in plaintext files makes it easier for me to backup (and gives me some assurance that I have a way out of it if I want). Finally, there are tools that manage word/odt/html to dw. So the initial importation need not be onerous. -- Michael Galea
Michael Galea via talk wrote:
I have never had a problem administering dokuwiki other than the usual installation wrinkles. And the fact that the content is stored in plaintext files makes it easier for me to backup (and gives me some assurance that I have a way out of it if I want).
I've had good experience with ikiwiki. It keeps the wikitext in a git repository and renders to HTML on the server as-needed, so I can fetch the repo and work in the plain wikitext with grep and vi and the usual tools, then push a commit to the server and it updates the HTML view. Or I can use it like a normal wiki and edit in the browser. -- Anthony de Boer
Hi, I feel old because I can say that I have worked with most of the systems mentioned so far: I have a personal professional policy of spending the energy to get good at a given tool before I critique it. If I have not "gone deep" with tool X I'll say so. 1. Confluence - I agree that the search is horrid. It's got a couple of annoyances. For example I can't seem to make page anchors. If I make something a heading it gets an anchor but I want to make anchors in other places. The docs say you can but I haven't been able to get that to work. Also I've not done much semantic work in confluence. 2. Lotus Notes; that was a long time ago, I liked it, I don't recall there being any bog issue that kept me from getting the job done. 3. Mediawiki - my personal fav only because 1. OSS 2. plugable such that I can get neat semantic stuff to work. I use categories a lot, I use REDIRECT alot. I'm a firm believer in loose pluralism to start and rigorous lexicography as time passed. I love that I can do a stand alone server deploy of it, a two tier version, a containerized version, a cloud version, or a massive scaled out version. I love being able to do fancy semantic work in mediawiki. ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_wiki ) 4. Post Lotus Notes and Pre-mediawiki, I lived in Word docs. It was technically less sex, and required what now seems to be clunky process, but it was functional: track changes, versioned files etc . I even wrote macros that would maintain change logs and version numbers for documents. There are obvious cross platform issues. But maybe a gsuite docs version might work? 5. I was able to operate with Sharepoint , but only barely. I asked very little of it, and it delivered. :P It seems like it encouraged complexity for no good reason. 6. I've also used Tettra, a commercial provider. It's very simplistic. If your needs are simple it might be for you. I managed my expectations and it hampered me still. Another approach I have been toying is the "Documentation goes with code" approach. That is markdown files in code repos. Think README.md I like this. markdown is lightweight and easy to get. There can be duplication depending on application. Documentation about the software _where-ever_ you deploy it goes with the code. Documentation about how you have _specifically _ deployed it goes in the wiki. Operational lessons go in the wiki. I'm notorious for putting a hockey stick in the "number of pages" graphs for a given company's knowledge base. Which is to say I make the count go up quickly. IMHO documentation is an operational responsibility, like keeping the server up. It's also the responsibility of the architect. I'm also a strong proponent of organic growth but also "good curation". It should be easy for individuals to document as they desire. But the resulting "mess" should be curated, such that the plethora of view-points over time become a coherent, if dynamic, story. The system should not be so complicated as to be a "barrier to entry". It should be easy to add new documents, and correct mistakes. It should be auditable. Depending on how serious you are about documentations it should also have good analytics. It should support multi-media reasonably. You should be able to search it well. It should support some type of "synonym" system . In mediawiki I use #REDIRECT alot. If you are using a slang term for something, Imma catch that and send you to the canonical name. I've not used Dokuwiki. David On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 10:17 PM William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"? I guess, wiki for internal stuffs.
I'm using Words/Excel files. A chapter (Word) or worksheet (Excel) for different subject or project. You can insert screenshots, tables, etc. Screenshot of installation or picture of DIP switches is way simpler than trying to explaining it in words. You can cut/paste from original documentation.
But, I'm curious what others are using. -- William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca> --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- David Thornton https://wiki.quadratic.net https://github.com/drthornt/ https://twitter.com/northdot9/
On 2020-10-30 3:34 p.m., David Thornton via talk wrote:
3. Mediawiki - my personal fav only because 1. OSS 2. plugable such that I can get neat semantic stuff to work. I use categories a lot, I use REDIRECT alot. I'm a firm believer in loose pluralism to start and rigorous lexicography as time passed. I love that I can do a stand alone server deploy of it, a two tier version, a containerized version, a cloud version, or a massive scaled out version. I love being able to do fancy semantic work in mediawiki. ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_wiki )
I second the semantic mediawiki plug. My group still uses mediawiki pretty extensively despite having been told that we don't... We originally built a lightweight project management environment in it. We don't make much use of all that semantic power anymore, but even though our official documentation is elsewhere, the wiki is still our standard repository of shared (especially miscellaneous) knowledge. I guess I would say that even though mediawiki is larger than many wiki implementations, it's nevertheless easy to deploy, and can grow enormously in complexity if you have the need. Mike
I would also add that i've "lived with" Mediawiki for a while, through various upgrades and server moves. It was simple and straightforward. In a world of increasingly complex systems, a simple system is a joy. David On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 4:02 PM Mike via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 2020-10-30 3:34 p.m., David Thornton via talk wrote:
3. Mediawiki - my personal fav only because 1. OSS 2. plugable such that I can get neat semantic stuff to work. I use categories a lot, I use REDIRECT alot. I'm a firm believer in loose pluralism to start and rigorous lexicography as time passed. I love that I can do a stand alone server deploy of it, a two tier version, a containerized version, a cloud version, or a massive scaled out version. I love being able to do fancy semantic work in mediawiki. ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_wiki )
I second the semantic mediawiki plug. My group still uses mediawiki pretty extensively despite having been told that we don't...
We originally built a lightweight project management environment in it. We don't make much use of all that semantic power anymore, but even though our official documentation is elsewhere, the wiki is still our standard repository of shared (especially miscellaneous) knowledge. I guess I would say that even though mediawiki is larger than many wiki implementations, it's nevertheless easy to deploy, and can grow enormously in complexity if you have the need.
Mike
--- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- David Thornton https://wiki.quadratic.net https://github.com/drthornt/ https://twitter.com/northdot9/
On 2020-10-29 10:17 p.m., William Park via talk wrote:
How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"? I guess, wiki for internal stuffs. [snip] But, I'm curious what others are using.
I've been using Dokuwiki for years. I like the simple install and that it doesn't require use of a database. I chose it because it is geared more towards documentation compared to a lot of other wiki systems. Dokuwiki pages can also be turned in to a OpenOffice/LibreOffice document. -- Cheers! Kevin. http://www.ve3syb.ca/ | "Nerds make the shiny things that https://www.patreon.com/KevinCozens | distract the mouth-breathers, and | that's why we're powerful" Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172 | #include <disclaimer/favourite> | --Chris Hardwick
participants (13)
-
Anthony de Boer -
David Collier-Brown -
David Thornton -
Howard Gibson -
James Knott -
John Sellens -
Kevin Cozens -
lsorense＠csclub.uwaterloo.ca -
Michael Galea -
Mike -
mwilson＠Vex.Net -
William Park -
William Witteman