Ask HN: What wiki/intranet do you use at your company?

#1

Post by XavierPladevall » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 10:45 PM UTC

At my new company we're looking to adopt an internal wiki/intranet and I was wondering what do you guys use where you work?

I know that big companies like Facebook have built their own solutions but curious to see what other companies use. For example, I recently came across Stripe's Home (https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home), which seems to be their own internal version of a wiki/intranet.

Curious to hear about what solutions you've considered and/or what you like/dislike about what your company currently uses(:

Edit: Some people apparently just use Notion and/or nothing and just share docs with each other. Also curious to know if this is your experience

Re: Ask HN: What wiki/intranet do you use at your company?

#2

Post by souprock » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 10:53 PM UTC

Good old MediaWiki, the software running wikipedia, works great. There will never be a concern about scalability (LOL), licensing, product discontinuation, or data import/export.

Re: Ask HN: What wiki/intranet do you use at your company?

#3

Post by XavierPladevall » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 11:05 PM UTC

souprock wrote: post #2

Good old MediaWiki, the software running wikipedia, works great. There will never be a concern about scalability (LOL), licensing, product discontinuation, or data import/export.

Ah very cool. Do you link to your other docs here? Stuff like support tickets (JIRA, ZenDesk), design files, spreadsheets, etc.?

Re: Ask HN: What wiki/intranet do you use at your company?

#4

Post by bifrost » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 11:15 PM UTC

Depends on what you want to store in it TBH. Most Wiki software has terrible permissioning. I hate Confluence and kinda like Trac/TWiki. MediaWiki is easy but also lame.

Re: Ask HN: What wiki/intranet do you use at your company?

#5

Post by XavierPladevall » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 11:20 PM UTC

bifrost wrote: post #4

Depends on what you want to store in it TBH. Most Wiki software has terrible permissioning. I hate Confluence and kinda like Trac/TWiki. MediaWiki is easy but also lame.

Agree! This is the main issue we've had as well at least when it comes to sharing personal docs with the team and viceversa. Is this what you mean?

Re: Ask HN: What wiki/intranet do you use at your company?

#6

Post by souprock » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 11:34 PM UTC

XavierPladevall wrote: post #3

souprock wrote: post #2

Good old MediaWiki, the software running wikipedia, works great. There will never be a concern about scalability (LOL), licensing, product discontinuation, or data import/export.

Ah very cool. Do you link to your other docs here? Stuff like support tickets (JIRA, ZenDesk), design files, spreadsheets, etc.?

Documents get put in there, yes. The ones I pay attention to are PDFs containing hardware documentation.

We don't have to put everything there. We also run the reddit software, an IRC server, a plain old web server that users can ssh into, and a CIFS file server. It's mostly standard highly-scalable free software, and it all runs without an internet connection.

We do sadly have a bit of a JIRA addiction. It's a bad habit that is hard to break. The lock-in is real. Never start down this path.

One nice thing about the free software is that you can clone a fresh VM for a new project. You don't have to purchase anything. Use of a VM solves lots of troubles with access control.

Re: Ask HN: What wiki/intranet do you use at your company?

#7

Post by rurban » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 11:40 PM UTC

My own, PhpWiki, heavily customized and integrated with a search engine.

Confluence or SharePoint are horrible, MediaWiki is lame. DokuWiki is nice. But most important is the content, not the platform.

Re: Ask HN: What wiki/intranet do you use at your company?

#8

Post by bifrost » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 11:43 PM UTC

XavierPladevall wrote: post #5

bifrost wrote: post #4

Depends on what you want to store in it TBH. Most Wiki software has terrible permissioning. I hate Confluence and kinda like Trac/TWiki. MediaWiki is easy but also lame.

Agree! This is the main issue we've had as well at least when it comes to sharing personal docs with the team and viceversa. Is this what you mean?

Yeah, most Wikis make it hard to make private docs then share them easily. Most Wiki's are public or nothing. Sharepoint has the best permissioning but basically requires an admin from user #1...

Re: Ask HN: What wiki/intranet do you use at your company?

#9

Post by XavierPladevall » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 12:06 AM UTC

bifrost wrote: post #8

XavierPladevall wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree! This is the main issue we've had as well at least when it comes to sharing personal docs with the team and viceversa. Is this what you mean?

Yeah, most Wikis make it hard to make private docs then share them easily. Most Wiki's are public or nothing. Sharepoint has the best permissioning but basically requires an admin from user #1...

Yeah the overhead is just too much :/

Re: Ask HN: What wiki/intranet do you use at your company?

#10

Post by XavierPladevall » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 12:24 AM UTC

rurban wrote: post #7

My own, PhpWiki, heavily customized and integrated with a search engine. Confluence or SharePoint are horrible, MediaWiki is lame. DokuWiki is nice. But most important is the content, not the platform.

Yeah we thought about confluence but we also use notion and a bunch of other tools that makes it hard to integrate stuff. That was our dealbreaker (we're not married to jira yet(:_ What don't you like about Confluence?