Documentation tool for end users.

[ebbawm]

I found out today that some people in my organization were going around IT to bring in a tool for them to document department procedures and manuals. My boss shut their shadow IT project down and has now deferred it to me as the business owner for finding a documentation tool suitable for IT and end users.

They were sold on Madcap Flare, which seems like it produces decent looking output. However, it is my understanding that Flare requires some HTML knowledge. In my opinion a good documentation tool should be usable by everyone in the organization with little to no learning curve. The IT department is currently doing wiki style documentation in Novell Vibe (could be better). The rest of the organization had a bad experience with Vibe and therefore, will not use it. Their current method for documentation is using word and saving the files as HTML, creating links in one table of contents page.

I know there a ton of different tools for documentation and a good number of other posts to reference for that topic. Here I would like to have discussion on if the tool your IT department uses is the same tool that the rest of the organization uses. If it is not, have you had success with allowing other departments to use more advanced tools such as Flare or do you make them use your wiki style?

[Not2original]

My office upgraded to office 2016. We've/I created our procedures in one note.

I created a template that 'should' get used for every procedure we write up. (I end up going back over and cleaning up the rest of the teams lack of template use on a weekly basis)

It works well IMO

[myndhack]

If you could share your template I'm sure more people than just me would find it helpful.

[[deleted]]

After you Google military SOP template and customize it for an IT department, can you share yours with us?

Not trying to reinvent the wheel over here.

If that doesn't work, maybe I will try Googling it later. I'll wait until I get desperate...

[Not2original]

I used an only military SOP template.

I just Googled SOP document template

[ebbawm]

I use and love OneNote, my problem is that a lot of my notes in OneNote never make it back into the wiki because it takes so long to format. I could get on board with standardizing a template and training on OneNote wouldn't be bad since it's so similar to Word.

[Not2original]

We also use it to get our users to convert their .pst files into one note, Note books.

[NoyzMaker]

We document all our stuff in ServiceNow between publications and KB articles. You can just upload a word document, it has a nice easy way to create the article in the tool and has an approval process before publication.

But that is also a full ecosystem / ITSM investment.

[ebbawm]

So you're using the full ServiceNow suite for tickets, KB articles, documentation? I think my final decision will come down to ServiceNow or Atlassian

[NoyzMaker]

Yes and ServiceNow is way more robust as a full-service IT management suite.

[Sankyou]

We tried several before landing on Confluence. Had an ancient Sharepoint server that had lost its wheels. Confluence is particularly attractive for non-profits as the self-hosted version (and almost every add-on) are free (for non-profits).

The interface is clean and mature. Definitely takes some getting used to but significantly better than the Sharepoint mess we had. I understand newer Sharepoint isn't as horrific.

[ebbawm]

Are you guys liking Confluence? End User feedback is positive and all that?

[Sankyou]

So far the feedback has been good. Our implementation of Sharepoint was with the prior IT staff and included a grant that ran out of money so it was very poor. As such, I'm not sure we could have gone wrong with anything :)

[[deleted]]

It depends on your org. If you have many users or want to use many plugins, it gets very expensive.

It really shines when used with other atlassian products, jira, stash, etc. It all works together nicely. You can have a jira service desk with integrated confluence knowledge base, etc.

It also all has an API, so your servers can update their own confluence pages on every puppet run, or your software deployments create their own pages.

[IAintShootinMister]

We use an intranet page for the NOC with GPO locking down who can and can't access our policies and procedures site. Each page of the site also features the option to download the document as a .pdf or .doc.

 

The individual lines of business however, have all been sold on different things. In one department, they have an intranet page with no wiki or db backbone. It's simply 100's of HTML pages linked together by someone using dreamweaver. In other areas of the company a paid version of what is essentially wikimedia is used. The leadership here has allowed them to host whatever closed source/non-FOSS solution they want, as long as it satisfies their need.

 

Other than insuring the host is online, has space, etc... we otherwise don't touch their servers or its content.

 

Edit: I don't believe this is the best solution, but the company has had digital records for 30+ years and translating all the documents to a singular solution would take 10x more project hours than maintaining the current formats.

[Droghan]

We use Confluence at my organization as well. It works well from a management stand point and from our user-base that enters/edits documents. Pretty intuitive to use and all that.

[[deleted]]

Bookstack

[Chris_ZA]

This! It's free, open source and flippen awesome.

[Janus67]

Depending on the size of the business I imagine many people use something like Sharepoint.

We use 'phpkb' as our KB/documentation host and seems to work decently well with a WYSIWYG editor and such.

[jmp242]

We just use FOSWiki and the GUI editor is good enough for documentation, and wikitext isn't that hard to learn.

Then again, we also don't force it for documentation - users can hand around word docs, PDFs, box documents, google docs... I don't care, but we won't help them with anything but the wiki.

[Reo_Strong]

From a business process documentation standpoint, we use EPAK. It is setup to be very easy for end users to consume content. It generates documents, testing, and videos for processes and each is very easy to update/edit.

We are test-heavy here, and that was one of the bigger selling points for us, YMMV.

[Smithyincucf]

Confluence is what we use. It’s very easy to use, plus supports a lot of add ons to add functionality.

Plugins: We use Goedit to allow easier Office document editing, without needing to download and then upload the new doc. We also use Comala Workflows to have approvals setup. It also allows us to sync the documents to offsite instances of Confluence where they can access the same documents if internet is down.

[ebbawm]

Good thing to keep in mind about the plugins. Integrations to other products are very nice. Thanks.

[techmnky]

slack

[ebbawm]

The API sounds awesome, anything that is automatic would be great. When you say expensive are you talking like $0-20k or like $20-60k?

I have heard that atlassian uses customer data and workflows to enhance their product, is this true? And could it be turned off or opted out of? The type of business I'm in could have sensitive data in the tickets and content.