Ask HN: What do you use for “knowledge management” in teams? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you use for “knowledge management” in teams?

4 pointsBWStearns5 comments

So as much as I hate the term (for it's buzzword-i-ness and tendency to be a harbinger of endless meetings) knowledge management I need to find some kind of solution to asynchronously and collectively modify a relatively widespread library of information. The info is a mixture of business and technical information. Only about half of the users are technical, but both tech/non-tech will need each kind of information.

I want to avoid using a standard Wiki because editing them kind of sucks unless you're already used to it and I want any tool I introduce to have a very easy learning and adoption curve. If it was just developers it'd probably be fine, but again, we do have non-technical people who don't find learning new tools all the time to be quite as tolerable. Collective Google Docs is too cluttered and prone to anarchy/replication/low-quality and is a pain to search.

I am kind of envisioning keeping profiles on events, people, organizations, and projects so that no one has to corner someone and make them brain-dump on random subjects every time they're starting to deal with something new to them but not for the organization.

Any advice, good tools, etc?

EDIT: I just (re)found a tool called TikiWiki that looks fairly promising, anyone have input on that one?

It's sort of a Wiki, but Atlassian Confluence is the tool I've been recommended in the past when faced with this problem. We have a limited number of folks in our DevOps group using it and they love it.

Shameless plug, but my startup Xendo (http://xen.do) connects into Google Drive, Evernote, Dropbox etc. and provides a single search across all of them. You can 'pin' content so team-mates will see specific items promoted to the top of their results if they're relevant to their search. Let me know if you're interested in following up.

Use whatever, as long as it has good search? SharePoint doesn't appear to be as awful as I'd been led to believe, as long as you use Microsoft Everything (but does handle e.g. Word files on a share); Atlassian Confluence is tolerable on big hardware. Don't expect to get good-looking prints out, though - Scroll is no LaTeX.

Knowledge management isn't a buzzword you should avoid, our team definitely got better because of it (granted, we're a small company).

Redmine wiki features are okay for our needs. Any software will do you great service if you have the mindset to record your findings.

I have no issue with Knowledge Management the practice. I have seen instances where the phrase itself became a barrier to what was actually intended because it funneled thinking into a narrow band of software that specifically labeled itself as such. I have no such fears within my current organization but I feel that anything that has become/might be a buzzword should be met with suspicion (the phrase not the concept) so as to avoid the day where we really can't accurately describe what we mean by it anymore and we realize we're talking about nothing. </rant>

Redmine actually looks pretty cool. Sadly I need to try to push for something more user friendly. Anything I add needs to be usable for non-tech folks who hate learning new tools or else my day will vanish into tech support. I'm playing with Confluence right now and it seems promising, but I would really like to find a self-hosted open source alternative where we had the option of adding features/customizing.

Anyone have opinions on confluence or comparable apps/services?

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