Ask HN: What do you use for internal documentation? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you use for internal documentation?

7 pointsmmaunder14 comments

We currently use the Fogbugz wiki and it's horrendous. We use mediawiki for external docs and that's a bit of a pain too - lots of work to skin it, not very user friendly. We also use Google docs which is a great applicaiton but not very good at managing and organizing lots of internal documents for a team.

I'm looking for something for a small team (5 to 10 people) to very easily add documentation to that can include file attachments, formatting and includes revision history. It would be great if it was self organizing e.g. auto generated lists of recently modified, most frequently accessed etc.

I would like it to have these features out of the box along with great security i.e. it's for internal use only and has secure sign-on.

We need this for ops docs, network diagrams, documents about our security audits, tools and configurations, product specs, project plans, biz plans etc.

I'm expecting to pay for the service.

I'd love to hear what other HN members and businesses are using. Thanks!

I've used a simple wordpress wiki theme called "KnowHow" for a lot of clients, if you're looking for an easy-on-the-eyes setup that's easy to maintain. I've used it for small business's sites and I've also used it to set up an internal KB for a nation-wide shoe retailer while working in their IT dept... with a couple tweaks and plugins you can setup some pretty decent workflows and approval steps for authoring.

Do you have any examples? link to repo? Thanks!

I'd love to use Confluence, however, it's incredibly resource intensive and requires a lot of admin time. Furthermore, JAVA is something I know little to nothing about so it makes me a bit uncomfortable.

For distributing documentation I really enjoy using MkDocs (http://mkdocs.org) or Daux.io (http://daux.io) as both are written in markdown and then generated into responsive HTML/CSS sites that can easily be versioned with Github or Bitbucket or any other version control application.

While the generating & updating of documentation and pushing to a server may be "too technical" MkDocs makes it pretty easy to deploy to Github Pages or generate the HTML to a static directory that can be deployed to a private location.

You could have a simple git hook that looks for new commits and re-publish HTML files and then deploy those with something like Deploybot (http://deploybot.com/).

In terms of authoring the content it's simple Markdown formatting, pretty simple to get the hang of. However, it lacks the file upload functionality you're asking for.

I don't use it, but I've heard great things about Read The docs: https://readthedocs.org/

I believe the documentation for the hangfire library uses it: http://docs.hangfire.io/en/latest/#

MkDocs (http://mkdocs.org) has a readthedocs theme and can actually be deployed to the readthedocs service. It's a bit easier to get setup on a system for the initial documentation to be produced IMHO.

We previously used Basecamp[0] but have switched to Confluence[1] in the last month or so.

[0]: https://basecamp.com

[1]: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence

What prompted the switch?

Given the mixed technical/non-technical nature, I'd suggest something like Gollum (the thing that powers GitHub's Wiki's) because you can allow both "in-browser" editing and (for the technically minded) local editing via the raw markdown/RST/etc files in a cloned git repo.

We use Jive and it's pretty good, although my personal favorite is Confluence because you can organize a lot better there.

Confluence by Atlassian (we also use JIRA)

Same here, both Confluence and JIRA.

It took a lot of work from several team members to get it to the current state where most people are happy about how it works, though.

But I think you can't avoid some level of customization for any platform you choose.

A positive is that they're getting a nice ecosystem, with several interesting plugins.

I've used dokuwiki, very friendly, not too hard to work with, you can set up ACLs user/groups, etc.

We have a GitHub repo that anyone can make PRs to.

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