Knowledge Management Software

ctwardell

I'm looking into setting up a knowledge management system for my company.

The idea is to have a repository of information, code snippets, sample drawings, documents, etc. that could be searched and updated by employees.

So far it is looking like twiki or foswiki might be good candidates.

Does anyone have any suggestions or success/failure stories to share?

Thanks in advance,

C.W.

ctwardell

Looking at Screwturn Wiki also, it is an ASP.Net app where the others are mostly LAMP based.

I thought this subject might have be of interest since a lot of folks on here seem to run small shops where there is a lot of technical knowlege that would be good to capture for future use. I'm at the point were I need to add staff and I want setup a good foundation for sharing information and best practices.

C.W.

rosco_pc

Basically any wiki would do and running a small LAMP setup is not very difficult, use any old PC to run your favorite flavour of linux and make sure to do a regular (at least daily, possibly more often) backup. This mean that you can be up and running very quickly if somethings happens with the server. As it is an internal server you can be a little bit more relaxed with updates, but it still pays to regularly apply updates (I personally like to use Arch Linux and update weekly).

I had been running an old HP tower internally in the company 24x7 for 3 years without any problems (apart from some power outages in the building) with an active community of around 2000 people (the company itself is around 100.000 people and they now mandate the use of Sharepoint, which I do not like, and I recently migrated all content to that)

If I would set this up again I would look for something with GIT version control as a backend instead of a SQL based backend. The GIT Server can run on the same machine. This would fit well in the developers workflow.
I've been looking at WIKO (http://www.dtic.upf.edu/~dgarcia/wiko/) basically because it is python based , but not tried it out. There are other wikis based on GIT out there.

WBA Consulting

Since my employer is a non-profit, we utilize Google Apps (it is free for non-profits). I like using Google Sites to create knowledge shares or what I have termed "collaboration points". A collaboration point is a place that all people involved in a project or team can share information in multiple forms. For this, a Google Site works great and is very easy to use. Google Apps for Business is available at $5 per month per user for regular businesses. With Google Sites, I can sit down and it 20 minutes, have a wiki style collaboration site setup with docs, spreadsheets, pictures, hyperlinks, calendars, etc. Literally, it is that easy once you learn it (I fiddled with it for about 4 hours to get the skills necessary to quickly set up a Google Site) Anyone with web page creation type of knowledge will find it very easy to use.

Sharepoint is another commonly used solution, although I agree with rosco_pc and don't care for it. It requires more IT involvement for creating solutions which increases the resources required to get a project in place. It can be much more powerful depending on the version and modules you purchase, but does require true programmers to be involved in many cases.

I have also played around with Wordpress and you might be able to find templates that could be used as collaboration points.

ctwardell

Rosco and Andrew,

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll take a look at them.

C.W.