Any macro- or microISV collects a pile of miscellaneous information while developing, promoting and supporting its software products. This includes:

• know-hows
• algorithms
• company policies
• programming, development or marketing techniques and tricks
• standard solutions and workarounds for certain issues
• collection of links to various resources
• how-tos
• use cases
• experience with third-party software, tools or services
• research and analytical reports
• white-papers and articles
• statistics
• industry news
• events
• to-do lists
• contacts
• … etc …

The list is theoretically infinite. In practice these odd bits of information are usually stored in different unrelated sources: e-mails, help files, document files, source code comments, browser favorites, or simply as sticky notes on your desktop.

This causes the following problems:

• Complicated access to important data. You can simply forget where they are stored.
• Risk to occasionally lose some significant files, e-mails or paper notes.
• Difficulties in collaborative use of the information. Nobody in your team knows where you store your sacred knowledge. In the same time, you have no idea where your colleagues keep their information.
• Ineffective re-use of information. You often have to re-invent something that you’ve already done or research something you know.

To overcome the problems you must accumulate all bits of your corporate information in a single knowledge base with collaborative access.

Large companies may setup custom knowledge base as a part of their corporate portal, e.g. with MS SharePoint server. But I speak for small ISV companies today …

Relatively small companies like ours may use Wiki engine. I’d personally recommend MediaWiki. It’s free and easy to install on any Apache/PHP/MySQL hosting though it’s very powerful and flexible. The famous Wikipedia uses MediaWiki engine.

Although there are many useful extensions and modifications for MediaWiki you may start with just a few of the most important ones:

• SimpleSecurity allows setting access privileges for users. So, you can limit access to certain pages for some members of your team.
• SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi allows to insert source code sections into articles and to highlight the syntax. It’s very useful for software development companies. This extension requires additional installation of GeSHi library that supports dozens of programming language syntaxes.
• CharInsert adds toolbar to the editor for quick insertion of Wiki codes.

Setup wiki today and start collecting your information there. Each time you or your colleagues have discovered something important for your business add it into your knowledge base. It requires just several minutes to add a new Wiki article. After several months you will be surprised at how valuable knowledge base you have. This will increase your team productivity and will become a kind of the company assets.

Just don’t forget to protect your knowledge with password. Your competitors want your knowledge too.

Posted in Documentation Productivity
No Comments Yet Posted by Dennis Crane