Hi, all!
For those of you who work in organizations that do decent documentation, what are you using?
We currently just have a bunch of word docs in a SharePoint document library. I’ve previously used dedicated solutions for this such as Bookstack and Confluence. The company is very anti-Atlassian, so Confluence is out.
Just want to see what y’all are using as I search for a better solution.
Thanks!
Not using it, but Bookstack looked real nice for a documentation site.
We’re using a different wiki at the moment for it.
I had Bookstack at a previous org and really liked it, just nobody cared about it.
We’ve been migrating a lot of documentation into Bookstack this year, and like it a lot so far.
I setup bookstack at my last job and personally loved it. But yeah, takes a lot to get everyone on board with something like that. I liked that you could export stuff out of it easily too. Bridges the gap if you need to email documentation.
I recently migrated all our various Excel and Word documents from Sharepoint into a self-hosted Bookstack instance. I love it.
I have one shelf for stuff like SOP, contracts, etc, and another for customer documentation.
Thanks for sharing! I’m very tempted to give Bookstack a go.
Matterport tours. This is by far one of the best decisions we have made. We have notes, photos, documents, all linked in a 3D space of the site. We also use photogrammetry generated from drone footage for some of the larger exterior spaces and our wireless runs.
If we are on the phone with a client we usually pull the tour up in one window and the text notes up in another and we can walk them through anything. We also do cameras so I often link the cameras in the tour so we can just click and have Realtime interactions and see what the issue is.
We use WikiJs for documentation and user guides
I recently spun up an instance of Wikijs at work and have been loving it.
I had to get used to it a little bit but I love it now as well. Especially nice thing is that you can connect it to a ldap server for accounts :)
Documents, procedures, and manuals in Dropbox. Notes, reports, and to do lists in OneNote
Thanks for sharing!
You could have them take s look at XWiki - Tomcat-based, very Confluence-like, open source.
I will take a peek at this, thank you!
What are you using for bug tracking? IMO, the two should be hand in hand. If you’re using GitHub issues, then GitHub wiki would make sense to me.
I’ve never had good luck using SharePoint or Google Docs for documentation, it just gets lost. If you’re searching GitHub for an issue, it’s easy to expand the search to include wiki. Having documentation in a separate system means searching two places, which is not ideal.
For technical documentation, most of our teams are currently using Gitlab pages, however we are steadily moving to Backstage
How is backstage? I look at it and feel perhaps we should just be using all the features of gitlab. Does it really bring something better to the table?
Depends on how far you are looking to take it, I would say. Generally, I can see how a larger organization (around 500 people) can benefit from it, at the same time I can see how it can be a massive waste of time in other orgs.
Where I work we are hosting onlyoffice and integrate it with nextcloud.
Thanks for sharing!
Currently Confluence. We do have a split documentation policy, where long-lived and broadly communicated information should be on M365 (SharePoint and affiliated services) whereas more technical or short-lived (project) documentation is on Confluence.
But even certain broad-use information is showing up on Confluence more and more given it’s easier use (wiki and plugins like the draw.io support).
Cool, thanks for sharing! Yeah I think it would be hard to convince anyone to use anything but SharePoint but I’m just formating options. Definitely want as little friction but with decent structure as possible to encourage active use of it.
Dokuwiki instance
ITGlue has been working out well for us.
I love the look of ITGlue and one member of our team used it at several other orgs and loved it. It just seems pretty overkill with all the features since we have other platforms that handle the passwords/secrets/assets/etc. I do like the look of it though, and am considering it.
We use outline. Its a small startup with a solid product, and the devs are super responsive.
This looks pretty interesting! Will definitely check it out, thanks.
Documentation? What’s that?
Haha that would be most the people on our team’s response for sure.