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What's your go-to for team documentation?
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What's your go-to for team documentation?

raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

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.

    Thanked by 1HalfEatenPie
  • lentrolentro Member, Host Rep
    edited January 2022

    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.

  • Not_OlesNot_Oles Moderator, Patron Provider

    @raindog308 said: My gut says wiki

    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

    Thanked by 1commercial
  • 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.

  • DPDP Administrator, The Domain Guy

    We use Teams and SharePoint.

  • @lentro said:
    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.

    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.

  • @rcy026 said: Wiki.js

    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.

  • @MrEd said:
    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.

    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

  • @raindog308 said:
    My gut says wiki

    Mine says, FOOD, mostly, and grumbles other times.

    Thanked by 1bdl
  • SpeedBusSpeedBus Member, Host Rep

    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

  • SplitIceSplitIce Member, Host Rep

    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)

    Thanked by 1skorous
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