Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

I hate it, but it is the only thing we've found that meets all of our needs, isn't $500/mo+, and gives our mid level managers control.

We use it for everything from on-boarding, to training, to system documentation, to competitive intelligence documentation.

Sure we could build something custom, but overall it works and it's given the team leaders control over their "domain."

Too often this falls by the wayside because documentation of processes and preserving institutional knowledge, while extremely important, isn't the type of work that gets recognized or rewarded.

If anyone can recommend a good way to align incentives here, I'd be very interested.

For example, when I worked at a company that used Google Apps for Business for everything, I set up our documentation in a Google Sites Wiki. Now that I'm working somewhere that uses Microsoft for everything, I've set up a Sharepoint wiki.

In both cases, the tools wouldn't have been my first choice from a page-editing or layout standpoint, but the ease with which my less-technical co-workers can search and find information and process documents with their existing credentials has been key to encouraging broader use.

This is difficult and time-consuming to setup. But if you cann afford the effort, this gives you a very flexible system where you can decide what to store in a structured or unstructured manner. Structured data can of course be queried, aggregated, vizualized etc. Together with the Page Forms extension this can replace many Excel Spreadsheets and MS Access solutions.

If you really know what you're doing, you can even do moderately complex CRUD Applications. But then you really need to know your way around several extensions and of course wikitext.

For simpler use-cases I've also used Drupal. For this use case it's not as flexible as MediaWiki, but you can do a lot through the GUI and build custom Forms / Views.