Ask HN: How do your remote companies handle problem of sharing knowledge? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do your remote companies handle problem of sharing knowledge?

6 pointsmethyl10 comments

Hello everyone!

We've been discussing today on our retro meeting the problem of sharing knowledge across the company. The problem is that we have a lot of tools which we can do that, eg. Google Docs, Github Wiki, a blog, Dropbox etc. and it's hard to tell when to use which one as each of them has some pros and cons.

I wonder if this problem is already solved by some kind of tool which I was unable to find, which provides some kind of "Knowledge Hub" where you can find everything that is being shared across the company?

How does your company solve this problem?

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As the CEO of Atlassian, I'm obviously biased, but you should really check out Confluence. With 10s of thousands of companies using it for this exact purpose we have deep experience solving this type of problem.

Confluence provides templates for things like retros. It allows embedding of files, videos. Concurrent editing currently being rolled out.

Big thing with collaboration is ensuring things are public by default, which is not the case with Google docs and others.

You need it to be WYSIWYG for non-technical people to use, which rules out GitHub Wiki and others of that ilk.

Happy to answer any other questions about usage if you try it out.

Scott

Confluence is great, it just gets incredibly expensive rather quickly. Self-hosting the $10 version is probably the best route, however, it's fairly resource intensive and seems rather cumbersome (damn you, java) if you have issues.

I've recently discovered Markdown-plus. It is so much nicer (for me) to use than Confluence. It uses mermaid for it's diagramming. The ability to generate my diagrams from code like markdown is huge for me. I can share everything through github with my team like I do code. I paid $15 for the OS X app, but I'm pretty sure it's all free in other forms.

What about a simple phpBB or vBulletin forum?

It's a familiar interface, supports conversations, pinned topics, attachments, rich text, etc.

I've thought about this approach before and I think it may be a decent one.

We are a 3 year old startup and have had product/marketing/ops in San Francisco and engineering in Bangalore all this while. We use Google Docs power users and spontaneous communication happens through Slack and calls. Between these, most of our knowledge sharing needs are covered. Though as the team grows, Slack is becoming too noisy making it easy to miss messages, so we are rethinking that a bit.

Slack and HC are great but the noise aspect of Slack is both the magic behind their growth but also the weakness behind the experience.

I am currently researching this as well. We use Confluence at my day job, and that is ugly but fairly effective, but also relatively expensive (also I just don't like any of Atlassian's software design).

If there aren't any other modern tools out there this is RIPE for a new SaaS.

We are working on Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com), a lightweight real-time wiki offered as a SaaS. It would be great to get your feedback if you are researching this area!

I've long thought that an internal deployment of Quora would be great for this. Too bad they don't sell that.

Confluence Questions is basically Quora without the red design elements and network effected social growth model that will need to be driven by ads.

https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions

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