How do you do in-company documentation (enterprise wiki)? • Hacker News Board

Re: How do you do in-company documentation (enterprise wiki)?

#21

Post by dmharrison » Tue, Jun 17, 2008, 10:17 PM UTC

figured wrote: post #5

cscott wrote: post #2

We've implemented plain old MediaWiki in our division. It serves as a document and guidance distribution point to the wider corporate public, as well as an scratch pad for internal procedures and process. Due to the general lack of fine-grained access control and segmentation, we stood up two instances: one for the "public" site without authentication for read-only access (and mediawiki accounts for division members…

We use MediaWiki, it works for us just fine

Yep mediawiki is great, exports xml. We integrated this into madcap flare and our build. Published (goes to customers) chm, pdf and webhelp takes the latest snapshot and merges it in, internal users can grab the latest by browsing the wiki.

We have a backing internal discussion board for people to discuss training/presales/help and the like which is good for identifying gaps in the doco as well.

Re: How do you do in-company documentation (enterprise wiki)?

#22

Post by bporterfield » Tue, Jun 17, 2008, 10:24 PM UTC

We use Plone CMS (http://www.plone.org) and it's fantastic. Loads of options beyond standard wiki, easy to set up.

Edit: Quote from their site - "An eWeek Labs Analyst's Choice award winner, this open-source product is one of the best solutions period - for company portals and intranets" - eWeek, April 2006 issue

Re: How do you do in-company documentation (enterprise wiki)?

#23

Post by boredguy8 » Tue, Jun 17, 2008, 11:26 PM UTC

delano wrote: post #19

boredguy8 wrote: post #10

Confluence :(

Why the frown? I've had success with Confluence at 4 or 5 companies. My biggest complaint is the handling of major revisions to a hierarchy of documents but that's something that's probably specific to me. Confluence is a great fit for business and technical people in my experience.

1) J2EE. Which I suppose is a J2EE complaint, but the sins of the father...

2) Searching performs rather poorly in terms of the quality of results.

3) It's licensed.

4) It doesn't scale if you're doing anything more than a text repository.

5) Jira / Confluence integration is, imho, sub-par given that Atlassian makes them both.

Not an "end of the world, woe is me" story, but still ":("-worthy.

((NB: I haven't used any other wiki software, so it's possible that Confluence is far better than any other option...I hope not))

Re: How do you do in-company documentation (enterprise wiki)?

#24

Post by ra » Tue, Jun 17, 2008, 11:46 PM UTC

For an enterprise environment, Confluence is the best of the bunch.

1. It has commercial support (you did say: enterprise) 2. It's easy for non-techies to use 3. If you buy the optional "Crowd" product, you can do identity management using AD 4. Use the tomcat bundled version, but upgrade the VM allocated memory to a gig to prevent slowness. 5. Upgrade frequently

Re: How do you do in-company documentation (enterprise wiki)?

#25

Post by rcoder » Wed, Jun 18, 2008, 1:41 AM UTC

My small team (two network people, one sysadmin, two devs, one manager) gets a lot of mileage out of DokuWiki for project and systems documentation. It's fast, has good plug-ins, and stores pages in the filesystem, which we consider a plus because it makes backups and versioning a snap.

When we're collaborating with larger groups, though, we tend to pick Redmine by default. It offers a nice combination of ticketing, project management, and documentation features, without the learning curve of a traditional wiki or the deployment headaches of something like Confluence.

Re: How do you do in-company documentation (enterprise wiki)?

#26

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 18, 2008, 6:10 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: How do you do in-company documentation (enterprise wiki)?

#27

Post by ekzept » Wed, Jun 18, 2008, 6:10 AM UTC

yeah, but what do you do if, despite cajoling and management emphasis, none of the damn programmers want to use the damn things? they seem to feel the code is self-sufficient.

Re: How do you do in-company documentation (enterprise wiki)?

#28

Post by delano » Wed, Jun 18, 2008, 1:31 PM UTC

boredguy8 wrote: post #23

delano wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the frown? I've had success with Confluence at 4 or 5 companies. My biggest complaint is the handling of major revisions to a hierarchy of documents but that's something that's probably specific to me. Confluence is a great fit for business and technical people in my experience.

1) J2EE. Which I suppose is a J2EE complaint, but the sins of the father... 2) Searching performs rather poorly in terms of the quality of results. 3) It's licensed. 4) It doesn't scale if you're doing anything more than a text repository. 5) Jira / Confluence integration is, imho, sub-par given that Atlassian makes them both. Not an "end of the world, woe is me" story, but still ":("-worthy. ((NB: I haven't used any…

Yeah slowness is definitely ":("-worthy, but in my experience Confluence performs pretty well. It really depends how it's installed and how the database is setup also.

And the search is weak, I agree, but I haven't experienced any significant problems in scaling or Jira integration. It's also much more pleasant to deal with than SharePoint.

For technical-only teams, I highly recommend MoinMoin. It takes some hands on administration (maybe it's better now, I haven't used it for a couple of years) but it was worth it for the flexibility, plug-ins, and the fact that it stored pages in plain text files.