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Comment by mdeeks | Hacker News Reader

What does Google (or others) use for an intranet or team documentation? We're using Quip and it is just a black hole where documents go to die, never be seen again no matter how badly you want to find it.

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Within Google there are several tools, but the most common (and IMO best) is markdown. (Docs is a close second.)

Pros: Get's checked in like code, gets reviewed, and leaves a nice paper trial of edits.

Cons: Doesn't invite comments/discussions as well as Docs does.

For many years there was also a wiki that just didn't refuse to die. I think that when I left there was yet another attempt going on to migrate the content away from it. Surprisingly, one of the main appeals was that its availability was independent of Google's production environment (Borg, GFS and co.). If Docs or Sites were down, which was slightly more likely inside Google because most employees were on dogfood builds, it was going to be a fun day...

Amazon had a giant internal wiki that they used for team information, playbooks, design docs, etc. Formatting was kind of ugly, but the barrier to making an edit was super low, and having everything in one searchable place was super useful. From experience, I think any system that requires more than a few minutes to make an edit ends up not being updated and going stale pretty quickly.

Source: https://www.xwiki.com/en/references/amazon

Can't tell for Google, but Confluence is widely adopted (still I love to hate on it)

The challenge with Confluence - and all documentation systems for that matter - is that it needs a manager, someone who makes sure it's maintained, old / outdated pages get removed, the landing page is neat, and authors are encouraged to keep it updated.

I can imagine that can quickly become a fulltime job though. Still, a formal role of documenter / archivist in a bigger software endeavour should be considered.

Challenge with Confluence for me in particular is that it overrides common keybindings, e.g. C-b in a textfield inserts a pair of asterisks instead of moving the caret backwards one character.

It used to be Google Sites (then part of Google Apps for Business which is now GSuite), Docs and Slides which were indexed by an internal Google search engine called MOMA (which I believe was powered by the Google Search Appliance, but my recollection on this last point is faint)

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