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What's your go-to for team documentation?
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
in Help
In a work or team setting, what is your go-to for group documentation? i.e., for sysadmins, DBAs, etc. Stuff like procedures, notes on config, explanations of how to do things, KBs on previous articles, etc.?
Do you use a file share with Word docs, a wiki, Sharepoint, Confluence, or some kind of fancy online or self-hosted knowledgebase web app?
I'm working on rebuilding a team's documentation which is presently a galaxy-sized pile of Word docs and thinking there has to be a better way. My gut says wiki but...what do you like and why?
Comments
Notion is nice.
Or you just whack all those doc files into a folder on teams and call it a day.
Agreed, Notion is nice, and my team uses it.
The education company I worked at years ago used Confluence and had an internal DocuWiki, but I thought it was unnecessary.
Also dabbled with Mkdocs and Gitbook for publicly facing documentation.
We had our own internal-facing Confluence instance. Notion is nice. Now though, we're mostly shoehorned into Microsoft Teams.
ikiwiki
MetalVPS wiki -- Example ikiwiki implementation with a gorgeous, retro theme!
The ikiwiki approach combines chronological chat entries with cross referenced subject-oriented notes and tags.
ikiwiki uses git for tracking changes.
ikiwiki includes both command line and web interfaces.
Markdown works great with ikiwiki!
Thanks to @uptime for implementing ikiwiki for MetalVPS!
The MetalVPS wiki is free and open. If interested in participating, please see the Getting Started Page.
Best wishes and kindest regards! 🌎🌍
Tom
Just a traditional Google Sites and Google Docs do the work.
Saw other company using Notion, pretty nice.
Confluence
It depends on what kind of functionality you need.
Bookstack and Typemill are easy and simple, Wiki.js has more functionality but its still pretty easy.
If you look at hosted Read The Docs is very nice, and if you are willing to pay for it then IT-Glue is good.
Confluence gets the work done, it has everything, but personally I have never really liked it, cant really say why just a personal preference.
If it is just loads of text that needs to be accessible, I would look at Typemill with Learn theme.
Currently using dropbox and nextcloud.
Because anyway we need to share various files.
We use Teams and SharePoint.
confluence style is good. Teams isnt that nice i feel.
Notion
On a related note, I wonder if anyone has used basecamp for this purpose.
I've always liked Wiki.js and have kept an eye on it for a while. But last time I looked into it they had so many critical features still "in development" that it was just a half-baked solution.
I just checked out their site and wow. It seems I have to give it another shot as it seems like it's become a much more mature product now.
If I remember correctly, we use self-hosted bookstack for our knowhow page. It works well with AD integration.
On the other hand, our clients use confluence. If you already have jira, then confluence is the way to go. Integration is out of the box. And of course, AD also works fine.
Purely out of habit I continue to use DocuWiki for this use case. Easy to deploy, simple to use, and many people have some level of experience with it.
You put on a great point. The fact that Bookstack integrates with AD is important. At this point I'm all in on solutions that plug in to SSO solutions. It's such a pain in the ass sometimes to deal with unique logins for each X, Y, and Z self-hosted solution.
Give it a look at https://www.documize.com/
Confluence, a smaller team should benefit from Notion but I think if you wanted some form of complexity (but this would depend on whether you're using cloud/DC/EOL server) then Confluence is the way to go
Mine says, FOOD, mostly, and grumbles other times.
outline / https://www.getoutline.com/ seems like a nice option too, opensource and has a self hosted option available as well
I've enjoyed using Wikijs. I really like that you can save your docs to flat files(markdown .md's) and automatically have them pushed to a git repo.
Mkdocs with a trigger or cron. Or hedgedoc
Markdown in the projects repository.
For projects that are published or available to people who do not have access to source code / repository we publish these files as HTML / PDF manuals.
Used confluence in the past but distance from projects often results in stale documentation. We found the closer you keep the source documentation to the project the more up to date it is (developers to update as part of commit/merge process)