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

TWiki

[Anonymous Coward]

I am new to the world of Wikis -- especially as an administrator. I was tired of keeping my notes in a giant text file though. It was growing to about 1mb and was difficult to deal with. I tried an application called "WikiPad" and it lacked a lot of flexibility that I wanted (and cost $12).

What I've done recently is deployed a TWiki/PostgreSQL/Apache solution. Because I'm stuck on a windows machien for a majority of the time where I am, I'm using the Cygwin solution. It eats up virtually no memory (apache consumes perhaps 7mb of RAM). I have a "web" in wiki for me under my name for everythign in the world that is at all related to my personal life. From taxes to contacts to stories about my life and todo lists and random pieces of data. I even have all of my important pdf manuals for various home products uploaded to the wiki database and all of my important software drivers and utilities archived in/on it. Then I have a wiki "web" for my work. So when I want work related things (technical notes, policies, files, resources, links, communications, contacts, todo lists, etc) I click on WORK when I want my personal life I click on ME.

It works pretty damn well and has lots of plugins. It's open source and free, too. TWiki, postgresql, cygwin and apache are all 100% free. Compare that to the closed-standard microsoft solution... I'll take the awesome extendable free one!

Hire someone to customize for your needs.

[Coventry]

My company just implemented something like this for a client - feature-wise, I mean. We didn't do LDAP support or calendaring, but most everything else is there. In fact, we had to remove many of the features we wrote because the client decided not to use them - such as the capability for discussions to hang off of a document or a folder within the system.

Anyway, Something like Plone may work for you. If you don't find something canned that seems to do what you want - or you think something like Plone could work with snowmen modifications - look into hiring someone to modify the system you think will work best for you. Most of the systems out there you will look at are free - meanwhile sharepoint isn't. Paying someone to modify OS software to meet your needs may be cheaper than the licensing fees for sharepoint! There is something to be said for integration with all of the MS Office tools - but then again, a move to Open Office (or star office) would be easier to push in your organization if you didn't rely upon MS-Office specific systems in cases such as this. That is a lot of money your company could save down the line that you'd completely write-off with sharepoint - it just wouldn't be an option.

Anyway, consider hiring a consulting firm to do the work for a fee less than the cost of a sharepoint system - you'll get exactly what you need, and not be tied into MS. Many sharepoint systems need customization work performed in order to 'fit' with a company's needs - so down the sharepoint road you could wind up with license fees _and_ development costs.

As for a firm to use - if you have a local favorite you use, give them a buzz. If you don't - which you probably don't, or you would of asked them their opinion already - then consider www.neurokode.com. Of course, I'm biased, I'm a half-owner of :) Then again, we did just do something very similar to this for another client - and code reuse saves you money. Oh, and no, we didn't use Plone - Zope wasn't an option for the client (which was annoying - I love python), so we wrote a custom PHP-mysql system for them, to which we retain the rights. We may open source it at some point - but right now the project is still in the bug-fix warranty period and we're more concerned with the clients needs.

For those who are curious, we used several open-source utilities (via command-line calling behind the scenes from PHP), such as doc2html, to provide automatic conversion of documents into usable and searchable strings for use in a full-text index within mysql. Thus, we gained the ability to search DOC, PDF, XLS and other types of files without requiring the files themselves to be changed. The original files were stored seperately and available for download to authorized users of the site.