Ask HN: What wiki/intranet do you use at your company?

23 pointsXavierPladevall6y ago25 comments

At my new company we're looking to adopt an internal wiki/intranet and I was wondering what do you guys use where you work?

I know that big companies like Facebook have built their own solutions but curious to see what other companies use. For example, I recently came across Stripe's Home (https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home), which seems to be their own internal version of a wiki/intranet.

Curious to hear about what solutions you've considered and/or what you like/dislike about what your company currently uses(:

Edit: Some people apparently just use Notion and/or nothing and just share docs with each other. Also curious to know if this is your experience

25 comments

rurban6y ago

My own, PhpWiki, heavily customized and integrated with a search engine.

Confluence or SharePoint are horrible, MediaWiki is lame. DokuWiki is nice. But most important is the content, not the platform.

XavierPladevallOP6y ago

Yeah we thought about confluence but we also use notion and a bunch of other tools that makes it hard to integrate stuff. That was our dealbreaker (we're not married to jira yet(:_ What don't you like about Confluence?

neuroticfish6y ago

I like DokuWiki. I use it for personal projects but I couldn't picture it being used as an enterprise tool.

souprock6y ago

Good old MediaWiki, the software running wikipedia, works great. There will never be a concern about scalability (LOL), licensing, product discontinuation, or data import/export.

XavierPladevallOP6y ago

Ah very cool. Do you link to your other docs here? Stuff like support tickets (JIRA, ZenDesk), design files, spreadsheets, etc.?

souprock6y ago

Documents get put in there, yes. The ones I pay attention to are PDFs containing hardware documentation.

We don't have to put everything there. We also run the reddit software, an IRC server, a plain old web server that users can ssh into, and a CIFS file server. It's mostly standard highly-scalable free software, and it all runs without an internet connection.

We do sadly have a bit of a JIRA addiction. It's a bad habit that is hard to break. The lock-in is real. Never start down this path.

One nice thing about the free software is that you can clone a fresh VM for a new project. You don't have to purchase anything. Use of a VM solves lots of troubles with access control.

theonemind6y ago

Confluence. It doesn't seem good for highly technical users. As per the official documentation, https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-wiki-markup-..., Note: You cannot edit content in wiki markup

Search also seems terrible.

I don't have anything good to say about it relative to any other possible reasonable solution.

vladojsem6y ago

I can agree with you. I worked in the company that also use Confluence. The search is a nightmare... also linking of articles and folders, I didn't like that at all.

SignalsFromBob6y ago

We use Dokuwiki at work. It's simple to set up, needing only PHP and a web server, and integrating logins with active directory is easy. No need for a RDBMS. We also have some plugins like Bureaucracy (for creating forms), Include (to include a page inside of another page), Tag (for adding tags to pages), and Wrap (for adding some nice CSS style options and info boxes).

Artemix6y ago

Our wiki is a static site generated with the MkDocs tool (Material theme), auto-published on our internal web server through a dumb CI pipeline (a PHP webhook building the website).

BjoernKW6y ago

Many of my customers use Confluence.

If you have enterprisey requirements (SSO, user groups and permissions, needs to work well Microsoft Office files, integrations in general) it's pretty decent and certainly not as bad as its reputation.

barry00796y ago

I get the feeling confluence is as good as the effort you put in. For the love of God tag your pages or don't complain when nobody knows they exist.

throwaway92986y ago

Xwiki - it allows fine grained access control to pages. Design is clean, it's much lighter weight than confluence (which it replaces) and the search is also better than confluence.

bifrost6y ago

Depends on what you want to store in it TBH. Most Wiki software has terrible permissioning. I hate Confluence and kinda like Trac/TWiki. MediaWiki is easy but also lame.

XavierPladevallOP6y ago

Agree! This is the main issue we've had as well at least when it comes to sharing personal docs with the team and viceversa. Is this what you mean?

bifrost6y ago

Yeah, most Wikis make it hard to make private docs then share them easily. Most Wiki's are public or nothing. Sharepoint has the best permissioning but basically requires an admin from user #1...

1 more reply

tdimitrov6y ago

Confluence. It's not a bad product, but a bit bloated.

In my previous job we used GitLab (wiki) and I think it's a perfect mix of simplicity and functionality.

XavierPladevallOP6y ago

Ah will definitely check Gitlab's wiki(:

ohpls6y ago

I've been looking at making an internal wiki for my company and I think soon I'm going to try out getoutline.com, selfhosted

quickthrower26y ago

OneNote which is part of MS office is great.

Also using MediaWiki for public facing wiki, ie as a cms

sergiotapia6y ago

We use Notion for general Wiki/Roadmap purposes.

ecornflak6y ago

I've been looking at using this in my not-for-profit. Do you give everyone a login to edit/add content?

I'm trying to figure out the best way to not have everything public but let my volunteers access info without needing an account

the_arun6y ago

GitHub wiki is not bad.

roland356y ago

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fasting-cure-is-no-fad-1156...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

25 comments

rurban6y ago

My own, PhpWiki, heavily customized and integrated with a search engine.

Confluence or SharePoint are horrible, MediaWiki is lame. DokuWiki is nice. But most important is the content, not the platform.

XavierPladevallOP6y ago

neuroticfish6y ago

I like DokuWiki. I use it for personal projects but I couldn't picture it being used as an enterprise tool.

souprock6y ago

Good old MediaWiki, the software running wikipedia, works great. There will never be a concern about scalability (LOL), licensing, product discontinuation, or data import/export.

XavierPladevallOP6y ago

Ah very cool. Do you link to your other docs here? Stuff like support tickets (JIRA, ZenDesk), design files, spreadsheets, etc.?

souprock6y ago

Documents get put in there, yes. The ones I pay attention to are PDFs containing hardware documentation.

We do sadly have a bit of a JIRA addiction. It's a bad habit that is hard to break. The lock-in is real. Never start down this path.

One nice thing about the free software is that you can clone a fresh VM for a new project. You don't have to purchase anything. Use of a VM solves lots of troubles with access control.

theonemind6y ago

Search also seems terrible.

I don't have anything good to say about it relative to any other possible reasonable solution.

vladojsem6y ago

I can agree with you. I worked in the company that also use Confluence. The search is a nightmare... also linking of articles and folders, I didn't like that at all.

SignalsFromBob6y ago

Artemix6y ago

Our wiki is a static site generated with the MkDocs tool (Material theme), auto-published on our internal web server through a dumb CI pipeline (a PHP webhook building the website).

BjoernKW6y ago

Many of my customers use Confluence.

barry00796y ago

I get the feeling confluence is as good as the effort you put in. For the love of God tag your pages or don't complain when nobody knows they exist.

throwaway92986y ago

Xwiki - it allows fine grained access control to pages. Design is clean, it's much lighter weight than confluence (which it replaces) and the search is also better than confluence.

bifrost6y ago

Depends on what you want to store in it TBH. Most Wiki software has terrible permissioning. I hate Confluence and kinda like Trac/TWiki. MediaWiki is easy but also lame.

XavierPladevallOP6y ago

Agree! This is the main issue we've had as well at least when it comes to sharing personal docs with the team and viceversa. Is this what you mean?

bifrost6y ago

Yeah, most Wikis make it hard to make private docs then share them easily. Most Wiki's are public or nothing. Sharepoint has the best permissioning but basically requires an admin from user #1...

1 more reply

tdimitrov6y ago

Confluence. It's not a bad product, but a bit bloated.

In my previous job we used GitLab (wiki) and I think it's a perfect mix of simplicity and functionality.

XavierPladevallOP6y ago

Ah will definitely check Gitlab's wiki(:

ohpls6y ago

I've been looking at making an internal wiki for my company and I think soon I'm going to try out getoutline.com, selfhosted

quickthrower26y ago

OneNote which is part of MS office is great.

Also using MediaWiki for public facing wiki, ie as a cms

sergiotapia6y ago

We use Notion for general Wiki/Roadmap purposes.

ecornflak6y ago

I've been looking at using this in my not-for-profit. Do you give everyone a login to edit/add content?

I'm trying to figure out the best way to not have everything public but let my volunteers access info without needing an account

the_arun6y ago

GitHub wiki is not bad.

roland356y ago

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fasting-cure-is-no-fad-1156...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse