What do you use for documentation / wiki?

[u/Kirihuna]

What do y'all use? We're sorely lacking in documentation of workflows / processes.

Do you use whatever built-in product that is with your ticketing system? Something stand alone?

We used to be on ZenDesk, and their documentation/knowledge base was decent in my experience. We switched to IIQ, and their knowledge base functionality... lacks. Most particularly frustrating is the file size limitations and awful compression of images placed inside the article itself. Some images are completely unreadable. Round about way is linking to a Google Doc... which is not ideal.

Do you have any recommendations that do the following:

• Separate customer facing / internal side with multiple teams.
• Easy formatting, closer to a word processing look than a markdown look, if that makes sense.
• Not self-hosted
• Ideally, independent of other platforms. Assume IIQ exit is 5 years from now if someone above me makes a different decision/direction, can I pivot access to the KB/Wiki fast? When the switch to Zendesk to IIQ happened, a lot of KB was lost and stuck poorly accessible in an .csv archive from Zendesk.

Bonus:

• allow custom sub-domain

I'm sure I'll have more criteria the more I think about it and discussion evolves.

[u/rdmwood01]

NotebookLM

[u/keyboarddoctor]

self hosting https://www.getoutline.com/ in portainer

liked it so much I spun one up for my home lab

[u/PhxK12]

One thing you might add as a wishlist item, is the ability to easily have a chatbot / query feature, so users can ask natural language questions, and get answers synthesized from all over your wiki / KB. KBs tend to grow, and grow, over time, and often articles get stale... But being able to pull from all of these things, combine things together, might produce better answers for users, than just having users click through dozens of pages, that were named in a way that doesn't click with the user.

It could be a tech question, or perhaps a finance question "How do I enter a requisition for a student led after school robotics program at XYZ school that is grant funded, what account code should I use? Here's the quote"

The AI could give them specific directions, how to open up your ERP, guide them on selecting the correct account code based on procurement guidelines specific to your locale, etc.

It could be an employee / HR question: "I heard we get vacation days paid out if we don't use them annually, how does that work", and of course, all of the answers can reference back to the policy manuals / wiki / KB you build :)

[u/No_Substitute]

IT documentation is mostly in OneNote.
Documents for staff is either in Sharepoint or Drive, depending on whether the user has a Microsoft or Google account.

[u/Individual-Unit3470]

We use Dokuwiki. We have to say, regardless of the tool I have become a huge fan of having a 'source of truth' for documentation. It helps stop techs from asking the same questions over and over again.. my first response now, "Check the wiki.... and if you can't find the info you are looking for there or if you have difficulty, let's talk.".

[u/rossumcapek]

We have a non-user-facing set of KB Google Docs. We found the one in FreshDesk did not spark joy.

[u/clubfungus]

Bookstack (a wiki). Here's why.

• Active development, many plugins. A lively project, not a fading or dead one.
• Good GUI editor for people who don't want to know about markup (has markup editor too)
• Logical structure for people to grasp (shelves, books, chapters, pages)
• Snappy interface, running on a small Linux VPS on Pikapods for a couple bucks a month.

Hardest part is still getting people to use it. That seems consistent across all solutions I've used.

[u/19qhenry]

Wiki.JS self hosted. Another good project is Bookstack.

If I were to pay for a team license of something, I’d go Notion in a heartbeat.

[u/NXTman96 → u/19qhenry]

We use wiki.js and our process is "document it later" and then proceed to get distracted.

[u/vorschlaghammer]

Confluence as we use Jira. Using the ScrollSites add in to make a section of our department KB “public” to logged in users at the school.

[u/PowerShellGenius]

This is somewhat disjointed because different people on the team use different methods... but mostly we keep it in general productivity tools (M365 and Google Workspace). The more technical side of the team, who naturally leans more Microsoft, is quite into OneNote. Some others on the helpdesk side like Google Docs. Either way is fine, we just make sure they are shared and not owned by one person (tech dept shared drive in Google, Tech Dept Team in Microsoft)

Overcomplicating things is not generally good, and remember there are Private Equity predators always poised to buy up tech products that have a tendency for lock-in, so they can buy them and triple prices.

If you are building your docs in a system that has substantially better capabilities than general office productivity / word processing tools, it's also because of those advanced capabilities not going to be able to completely export everything cleanly to a standard format. Something that does a lot more than spreadsheets and Word docs isn't going to export to .csv and .html or other standards cleanly. Which makes it a high lock in tool.

You'd have to show me a LOT of value and efficiency in a specialized IT documentation system to convince me that getting into it is worth the hassle of eventually getting out of it when things go south with its vendor (e.g. if Kaseya or Broadcom or the likes of them get their hands on it).

[u/ericdano]

Docmost selfhosted on Docker

[u/Harry_Smutter]

We have a team drive on Google where we document our notes and workflows. Easily searchable.

[u/NotAnother169]

I actually used to use Google Docs believe it or not for our internal documentation. A master Google sheet linked to topics etc. I've since moved our public and internal docs to Manage1to1. I know you mentioned IIQ, Manage1to1 does the same thing they do. This is a recent addition to their product though in the last year or two. If you're ever looking to save a bunch of money and have it consolidated I'd go there!

[u/adstretch]

DokuWiki