

Ask HN: As a team, how do you organize your KB/documents? - redox_

What kind of tools are you using to store your shared documents &amp; collaborate with your team?<p>I have a pretty bad experience of using Wikis, which are most of the time out-dated. Trello&#x27;s lists appears to be too limited. And simple Dropbox&#x2F;GDrive shared folders&#x27; hierarchy lack of homepage&#x2F;cross-reference&#x2F;UI.
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dredmorbius
Generally, a wiki, usually (though not always) internal / accessible via VPN,
though increasingly publicly hosted.

I've used, implemented, and/or administered: Twiki, Atlassian Confluence,
Mediawiki (the Wikipedia engine), and others. My general preference is for
tools which are already well known and supported, with Mediawiki scoring well
on these grounds.

 _Simply accumulating documents does not constitute a knowledgebase._

The biggest problem is that information ages, it's hard to correlate with
other information (so your KB becomes inconsistent over time), and you _need_
to edit, prune, and review. _Failures of KBs to remain current indicate a
problem of_ process _not of_ tools, _and must be remedied by changes to
process, not tools._

I'm increasingly partial to systems which support creation of a book-type
document, rather than merely an accumulation of articles (though there may be
a place for both). In particular, a lightweight markup (my preferences are
LaTeX or Markdown), a solid outline, and a regular review process, are
probably a best-practice approach to this specific problem.

What I'd really like to see is a system which marries such an approach with
conversations (effectively: a mailing list) and issue tracking (BTS or
similar), and which allow for publishing a specific point-in-time document
with revision control: PDF, HTML, ePub, etc. The latter are particularly
useful as they allow for creating and distributing offline copies of
documentation which can prove useful in circumstances in which online access
isn't available or convenient (e.g., the server / colo / network has melted
down).

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Discrete
Google sites can work well, especially if you use Google docs. You can
customize the UI to suit your needs, and organize into any kind of hierarchy
you want. If your team is working with Gdocs for their actual day to day, the
site content can update as they do it (almost), so eliminates the issue of a
dead zone wiki. There are a lot of widgets available, so pretty easy to get a
1st version up.

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a3n
Sharepoint. It creates internal web sites much the same way that MS Word emits
concise, elegant html.

Ugh.

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madchops1
I create "intranets" (they are on the internet technically) for my teams using
google sites. Its easy and have found it fairly easy to maintain permissions
and manage the content.

