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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?"
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.
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
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Software: moin-moin http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/. It worked well enough, easy to install, and it was easy to set up credentials and permissions for groups on the diretory and page level for editing and even visibility. It's easy to get in and make simple changes to the code and there's a bunch of modules available of varying quality, though.
Funny anecdote, our group's manager pulled a Lundberg: "I uhh like the program and it works well, but is there a WYSIWYG editor for it?" [Although somewhat idiosyncratic, Wiki markup is trivial to learn and use, HTML looks like C++ in comparison.]
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
I reckon the people suggesting Google are on the right track. For better or worse, search is how people navigate heterogenous information these days and I think you are wasting time if you try and work out some highfallutin classification system.
Doesn't have to be Google though - there are a pile of tools (htdig etc) that you can use to crawl your kb and provide a basic search ui.
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.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
I always liked the idea of simple ascii commentary on ideas. and if you need to refer to something, well, use a link - people will 'get' that even if their ascii browsers don't.
I started in vax/vms with 'vaxnotes' and there was the notion of a base topic and its replies. it was simple, but it held the knowledge of DEC in a reasonable fashion, for many people, for many years.
then in the unix world, there was nntp/usenet. same basic idea. and also ascii-based. it scaled well and it worked well (and was well understood and simple enough to manage).
its worth considering. you can enable 'news' on linux boxes as clients (browsers) and servers. people can add (and edit and delete) content and its simple, free and best of all, it works.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
After taking over the developement for a telemarketing application, with no prior documentation, I immediately started a Wiki using OpenWIKI (they lean towards Microsoft servers for their stuff, so a basic IIS installation is all I had to work with), I convinced the admin guy to give me web space on it plus their SQL server, installed it and started entering everything I came across as I was either fixing or adding stuff. After about 3 months pretty much the entire system was documented to some degree, from the UI to nearly every technical aspect. Then, one of the execs found it, figured out how to add stuff, and now 8 months later it's probably 25% my stuff, and 75% is now full of up to date company practice and communication.
Task Mangler
Ideal solution: hire a good librarian. (Or "knowledge manager", as they prefer to be known.)
Google, Wiki, Notes and similar machinery are all well and good, but if you just let everybody stuff documents into the system, you'll end up with a large, undifferentiated heap of files in a dozen or more different formats. Ever tried searching for an Excel workbook with Wiki? A Visio file? An obscure CAD package file? An old CD-ROM of critical documentation in a proprietary format?
Managing documents is quite hard to do - fairly close to programming in terms of the skills needed. It doesn't happen on its own. It requires a cluey person who understands the business and the documents, who can classify and index the material as it comes in, and record where it is so that it can be found.
At the very least, it's a process that requires considerable thought, planning, and management. It needs to be viewed in that light - not "which search engine should I use?"
We set up a departmental Gmail account. Then, if someone comes across something useful, they can send it to the Gmail account. We obviously don't keep sensitive information on there, but it is good for almost everything else. The nice thing about the Gmail account is that it is easily searched, people at any location can get to it, and the only effort required is actually adding the information to it. If someone is anal-retentive enough to want to organize it, he is free to use labels, but so far, the searching has been adequate for everyone.
I struggled for days and days and all I got was this lousy sig.
I must de-lurk for this topic.
/ 1974/04/10/31-restrict-pages-under-mediawiki is a good page on how to restrict certain pages in MediaWiki. There is only one level of restriction though - the page is either restricted, or it isn't. To my joy I also discovered that while restriced pages also get indexed for searching, they do not show up among the search results if the user is not on the restricted level himself.
My company is currently centralizing all of its IT functions from the 42 Europe-wide sites it has. Knowledge management is a nightmare, as the institutional knowledge is spread too thin among the old timers to make any impact for the new people. We have some processes documented, but by far not all of them. We decided we needed a written repository of knowledge, as we are growin at a rate where we can not afford to waste time.
We finally decided on MediaWiki, just like some of the others here have suggested, for pretty much the same reasons. It is just great for unstructured information, and the ability to categorize and very quickly link to other pages has turned out to be very useful. It is very quick to update - no need to muck around with HTML and uploading a page. Just hit Edit, change that IP from 223 to 23, click Save and you're set.
Converting existing Word documents to wiki format is essential for quickly populating the wiki with content. We have a lot of support documents with screenshots. I found out that the best way to do that is to save the Word file as HTML. It will export the images both as JPEGs and PNGs. The PNG is the image as it was imported into Word, at its native resolution, while the JPEG is a result of how it has been processed within Word itself (cropped / framed / recolored). I generally just grab the PNGs, unless the cropping was significant, as the JPEG resolution is fairly low. As for the text, I just grab the plain text from the document and mark it up with wikicode. Fairly painless.
Additionally, I also found a nice tool for converting Excel tables into wikicode, for all those worksheets with server IPs, domain functions and other stuff. Save your Excel as CSV then fire up the converter at http://area23.brightbyte.de/csv2wp.php. Just copy-paste (or upload), and presto! You have a nice wiki table. You can then mark it up with colors and other bling-bling if required. Again, I found the process to be relatively fast and painless.
Keeping with the wiki way, the majority of our pages have unrestricted access. Since I'm not a great believer in security through obscurity, we needed something to protect sensitive information - mostly passwords. The privileged few that need to know can get bumped to a higher security level and access these restricted pages.
http://conseil-recherche-innovation.net/index.php
By the way, I full agree with the parent - the wiki by itself is not enough, you do need a librarian / knowledge manager to categorize all the braindumps and also to educate people on its mere existence. I also found that you need to pour a certain amount of info into the wiki before it reaches critical mass and people start to really use it. You do need to work a lot on it, especially in the early stages, with importing content. We didn't bother with scope definitions and categories and stuff - since all of this is so easy to change once the data is up, we'll just build it as we go along.