Implementing a Knowledge Management Solution?

dirtkilla asks: "I work for a large health care software vendor in our remote hosting area. Recently we've been asked to look into a Knowledge Management/Doc Repository type solution to implement. I have researched and installed a few options: C-arbre and TikiWiki. C-Arbre is lacking in documentation and Tiki seems pretty bloated. I'm facing people pushing to implement Microsoft Share Point, I'd much rather go towards an open non-Microsoft solution." How would you organize a variety of information, both digital and non-digital, into an easy to maintain system that just about anyone can use?

"We currently log all our technical info/instructions etc in Microsoft Word docs, emails and scribbles on paper. Share Point seems to be a logical solution for our collection of Microsoft Word documents, however I'm not much for loading Word to view something that could be displayed or edited in a browser.

I really like the Wiki idea, and found a VB script to convert Word to Wiki. However large documents may be a pain to do this with, and some people may not be comfortable with such a change. I can upload documents to the site and tie them to a particular page/File Gallery but I'm not sure about search functions searching the text of the document. I'd also like a way to export info, possibly to RTF/XML/HTML or some format that Word can read/edit/save and then import to the Knowledge Share.

I was hoping someone would have some advice/ideas/experience with getting this setup. Ultimately we'd like Searching, Grouping, LDAP authentication, Calendar functionality (we use Outlook so who knows), document storage, and Wiki functionality. It is the hope that something useful and user friendly which non-technical people would be comfortable using."

Comments

Opentext Livelink

[Tux2000]

Don't re-invent the wheel. Get a customizable product and an expert that can customize it.

I suggest Livelink. Well, it's not free. It costs money. It may cost lots of money if you want all those nice features. It's not open source. But I have enough Karma to burn. ;-)

Web page: http://www.opentext.com/

The consulting company I work for is based on knowledge. Fast, reliable and secure (permisson based) access to archived knowledge is mission critical. So there never was a problem buying the software we need for business, no matter what it costs.

My job is not Livelink. But I work in the same room as our Livelink expert. So I collect a little bit of knowlegde about Livelink. I'm the one he asks for Unix and network tricks.

Livelink has a document management (that's the main part), team rooms, workstreams, and a lot of other nice features. For details, have a look at the web page. Livelink is a core server, extended by a lot of scripts (in a custom language named Oscript), and a tiny CGI that passes requests from the webserver to the core server. If you own a development kit, you can customize nearly every aspect of Livelink, and you can see lots of code written by Opentext. So if you have the money, you can at least see most of the sources.

We use three dual-CPU W2K machines with Apache 1.3.x as Web and application servers, a fourth dual-CPU W2K machine for the indexer and search engine, a Sun 420 running Solaris 9 for the database (Oracle), and Linux Virtual Server (LVS) as load balancer for the webservers. We have about 1500 users all around the world.

Why so many servers? Most of the time, one web server is completely idle. Opentext would recommend a single server setup, and that would be sufficient. But we have demanding consultants, our problems are response time and availability. We have some queries that block a server for a while. So we need at least two servers. The third server is for load peaks and for downtimes of one of the other servers. Index and search also need a lot of power that would block a single machine, so it's placed on the fourth server.

Why W2K? The most recent version of Livelink requires it.

Why Sun? Oracle on Windows simply sucks, the raw CPU power of the previous multi-CPU x86 database machine was larger than the one of the Sun machine, but Oracle runs much faster on the Sun. (Now all corporate databases are switched to a Oracle/Sun cluster, but that's a different story.)

Why LVS? Simple: It works. We tried a load-balancing software called Resonate, a really fitting name for a piece of software that should implement a control loop. We kicked it because it was hard to maintain and did not work reliably on our machines. We tried LVS on a really old desktop and it worked great, even if we tried really hard to confuse it. Now it has its own x86 server running Slackware, and we did not have a single second of trouble with it.

Why Apache? We used Netscape Enterprise Server / iPlanet. It had a pretty web-based config tool and much bloat, and it costs money. Apache does the same job for free, and its configuration is a simple text file that can be copied to the various servers. MS IIS has bugs. Lots of bugs. Its mouse controlled. We did not even think about a test system with the IIS.

Tux2000