Knowledge Management for an IT Department?

Laurentiu asks: "In every IT department out there there's a wealth of heterogenous information floating around: code snippets, HOWTOs, FAQs, docs, spreadsheets, post-it notes etc. Asking Joe where he put that file won't work forever. So what is, in your experience, a good way to manage this knowledge? And what software would you recommend for such a task?"

Comments

MediaWiki

[akmolloy]

We've been using MediaWiki for this exact purpose: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki. It's easy to install, a snap to manage, and makes it easy to share your knowledge with the rest of the world if that's something you want to do.

Re:MediaWiki

[Bistronaut]

The engineering company I work for uses MediaWiki as well. It is perfect for storing all sorts of random information. All those "knowledge management" apps that try to categorize all your info in one fixed structure always end up being more work to maintain, and there's always information that just doesn't fit into the system. Wikis are easier to organize (therefore easier to get information out of) and easier to get information into as well. I tried some of the other Wikis, but MediaWiki ended up being easier to install and more powerful to boot.

Re:MediaWiki

[Shewmaker]

I haven't set up MediaWiki, but my coworkers and I chose MoinMoin because it doesn't require a database. We've been pleased with its ease of use, speed, and stability.

They have a Wiki Engine Comparison page that was useful for helping us decide which one best fit our needs.

Google

[RingDev]

Beleive it or not, Google Desktop search has saved me many a minutes of searching for opps manuals, work orders, business rule documents, log files, and many other assorted goodies. I'm not recommending it as a long term solution, but it works for short/mid range for small shops where the presure is on development.

-Rick

Ask IBM!

[nicholasperez]

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/9/27/95759/4240 -- just be sure you have millions upon millions of dollars and at least twice the amount of time you really need. Other than that, it should be a simple deal!

Ahem

[hostpure]

http://www.google.com/enterprise/ Works wonders, all the power of google in a little box and anyone in the office *should* be able to use the search features :)

Plone Help Center

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

While we are probably going to end up with SharePoint (which isn't a bad collaboration tool if all your fellow staff members know is Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), I personally like the Plone Help Center. You can see examples on the Plone web site or on my personal web site.

Some suggestions

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh the age old IT Department issue. How do I proactively manage and capture our information.

I'm still grappling with this. I've had some success in a previous company using TWiki to capture basic documentation. Its biggest drawback was a lack of document management. That said, the documentation I put in there is still being referred to and used. I think they were looking at moving to documentum (as a seperate project within the company) and were looking to see what wiki style functionality they could find.

I've recently looked at mediawiki, but keep being drawn back to TWiki. I just wish they'd get round to releasing a new production release of the app. The latest beta's are looking great.

As a seperate system, I setup a b2evolution (http://b2evolution.org/ site called maintlogs. I've setup categories corresponding to device names in the blogs so that we can enter comments against devices whenever we undertake work on them. I initially looked at pushing out an RSS Reader to each of the IT guys desktops, but then found an RSS2Email package which runs on a scheduled job every 15 minutes to email out new posts to the blog. Kind of kills the reason for RSS, but Email is part of everyones life already.