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Ask HN: How does your company manage knowledge and information

7 points by dpkrjb ↗ HN
I would like to know what tools your company uses to manage knowledge. It doesn't necessarily mean a tool like Confluence but maybe something more general purpose like Google Drive.

I am particularly interested in how you use it to create long lived documents (sprint meetings/coding documentation/meeting notes) and what use cases it is best suited for. We currently use Confluence but its design is clunky and slow. It is damn near painful to navigate and I dread when I have to use it to write documentation. It also doesn't seem suited to supporting code in the way that I would like (inline code is not natively supported) so it becomes less useful for creating a best practices guide for instance.

8 comments

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eberkund
Confluence seems to be pretty popular for reasons which I can't understand since like you said it's godawful.
PaulHoule
To be fair, the performance of a Confluence installation depends a lot on what hardware it is on. I've seen Confluence installations that take 20 seconds to load the page to make a new wiki page because they found a really ancient server with hardly any ram to run it on. That happens a lot because a lot of people think it is a low-priority, low-traffic service, then they assume Confluence sux anyway...
odonnellryan
I think there are a MILLION of different things you can use for this type of information. I don't like Confluence much, but it does work.

Best app is probably an internal Wiki. Works extremely well, easy to setup, searchable, etc.. etc..

I think that was always my favorite. But don't store passwords here. Use a secure PW manager. Sometimes you can even link to it from the Wiki.

My issue has always been the bulletin-board type of things. "Client XYZ expressed concern about this. Let's make sure we're sensitive to this."

I've rarely seen companies even make an attempt at spreading this type of info, and the ones that have have not thought of a good solution. No, sending emails to the entire department is not a solution.

Top19
Confluence is good. I will say I hated it at first, but it’s one of those kinds of software that you need to adapt to instead of the other way around.

It has a lot of good, the-way-it-should-be-done processes that if you force yourself to follow, can be very rewarding.

Some positives:

1. Great mobile app.

2. Lots of security. Audit trails, granular access to specific pages, 2FA.

3. Can sync users with Google Cloud Suite, nice to only have 1 set of users.

4. Very rich and detailed page design options.

5. Has other apps that bolt on. So much sensitive data can be stored in a wik, it’s nice to be able to securely share it into Jira (like Github) or Stride (like Slack).

6. Is only $10 for up to 10 users. Can also bring in on-premise (much more expensive though). This is good for HIPAA stuff.

kull
Google docs, google pages , wordpress for users faq. It’s far from perfect but it works okay.
dpkrjb
I think this is great for storing things which need to be accessed across the company (contract templates) but really fails to be as effective for discovery as a wiki/confluence
matt_the_bass
I suspect the answer is a function of team size. For smaller companies, less formal solutions may be ok.

At my company we use:

- Salesforce

- wiki

- google groups

- github

- Trello

tmaly
We use Confluence, but to get the most out of it, you need two things.

1) proper training for everyone that will use it. 2) processes regarding its use so your information is consistent.