My self-hosted servers were $10 each for 10 users. I ran into a few problems but Atlassian had intuitive help to get through them. Well, actually Hyper-V virtual machines running Linux. Having time on my hands I went with installing Confluence and JIRA on my servers. Many use JIRA for business project management and managing service.Ĭonfluence and JIRA are both available as cloud services from Atlassian. JIRA is an issue tracking tool that is great for software development. Users have that history of changes which helps with complex diagrams.Ĭonfluence benefits from tight integration with Atlassian JIRA. The Gliffy plugin tracks versions as well. Many times IT documentation is better with a network diagram or a business workflow. It is like a web based Visio for creating diagrams, flowcharts and so forth. Users can also attach Word, Excel, PDFs and other files.Ī cool plugin for Confluence is Gliffy. The history is all right there with that page in Confluence.Įmbedding and attaching pictures is easy in Confluence. They do not have to maintain many copies of a document. Having that history gives users more confidence. Like MediaWiki, Confluence keeps track of previous versions of the pages. When more than one user edits a page at the same time the changes synchronize between them in real time. A popup presents the user with the option to comment right on the page. Instead of emailing the author about changes a user selects text on the Confluence page. Working together on documentation is well thought out. I came across Atlassian Confluence while exploring Agile development methods. Don't get me wrong, I am very good in the Microsoft world but it felt like more friction to get things done. That lead to a lot of rabbit holes to get lost in when the focus should be elsewhere. And the easy extensibility worked against using it for documentation. SharePoint's wiki didn't work for me though. It seems like a natural extension for folks familiar with that world. SharePoint is well integrated with Windows and Microsoft Office products. MediaWiki reduced the friction of sharing and managing the documentation. And normal folks would some times let us know when documentation was out of date or wrong. That saved time for me and other power users. We could email hyperlinks to folks in need of support. Unlike the Word documents it was easy to search and find information. Contributors logged in to MediaWiki so we could see who made changes. The help was welcome for maintaining the IT processes and procedures. Wiki markup is weird and unnatural to normal people but a few folks at the company took to it. MediaWiki keeps older versions so it is easy to see the history of changes. It was easy and natural (for me at least) to build easy to navigate links to the IT documentation. I copied the Word documents into the wiki. An old donated PC was host for Linux and MediaWiki. Then I discovered MediaWiki, the Open Source software that runs Wikipedia. It was time consuming to keep details up to date as software and systems changed. Because of the number of documents it was hard to find stuff. My predecessors did a great job of documenting the details in Microsoft Word. I had to get a handle on the multitude of systems, servers and software. Years ago, I was the new system administrator at the company.
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