Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation
-
NTG is embarking on an investigation, discovery and decision process around documentation and we'd like to get this as "right" as possible. Obviously we've been doing documentation for forever. Over the years we've used Dokuwiki, MediaWiki, SharePoint Document Library with OneNote, SharePoint Wiki and more. There is always a need for ad hoc documentation that does not fit neatly into tickets or other highly defined format. Right now, our latest attempt which worked somewhat well was OneNote documents on top of SharePoint. But we are now looking to move away from this.
We feel that a wiki is likely the best answer, but I hate to inject that opinion and just overlook other viable options. And I hate to just jump on the most popular wiki(s) and potentially ignore something really interesting or important.
Things that matter to us are ease of use, multiple simultaneous editors, low cost for a large number of users (self hosting and open source are likely the answers here), independent authentication or authentication options like OAuth or both and good handling of text (Sharepoint is an utter failure here.)
Ability to strictly tag metadata would be awesome (like maintain an actual customer list and have that be a tag on each page). And just ad hoc tags would be great, too.
Would love to hear what people use, have seen, hate, love, think sounds interesting, etc.
-
Why are you looking move away from OneNote? It's free. At least for personal use.
As for business, you have O365, are you looking to dump that?
-
@Dashrender said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
Why are you looking move away from OneNote? It's free. At least for personal use.
That it is free for personal use doesn't make it of any particular use to a business. Nor is it very efficient. It's okay, but very hard to search through. It handles rich media well, but that's about where it ends.
-
@Dashrender said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
As for business, you have O365, are you looking to dump that?
It's $16/mo/user for the SharePoint and MS Office features that are used for only this documentation. That's a very heavy price tag for something that isn't as nice and useful as a wiki.
-
Microsoft pretty much screwed partners on licensing. So we went from 75 licenses of E3 O365 down to 10. Which brought up something that Scott and I discuss every year when it's time for renewal. Do we want to stay bound to MS for our documentation (among other things).
This year the answer was a loud and resounding NO! So now we move to something a bit more flexible. What that is.... well we are trying to figure that out.
-
I would think your ticketing system would have to tie into your mediawiki post. And that any tie in between the two would be a great thing for you.
Something that might pull your ticket details and tie that into the wiki namespace or category that is appropriate....
Might be something that is workable.....
-
At that cost, it's gotta deliver some whopping value for us as we don't use MS Office at all, nor do we use Yammer or Skype for Business. If Sharepoint isn't up to par, $16/u/m is crazy. It's a lot of users, so the cost of moving to something better is pretty trivial compared to sticking with it.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
@Dashrender said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
As for business, you have O365, are you looking to dump that?
It's $16/mo/user for the SharePoint and MS Office features that are used for only this documentation. That's a very heavy price tag for something that isn't as nice and useful as a wiki.
It's that much? On the E plans?
I will have to see if I have access to OneNote on SharePoint on my Business plan account.
-
@Dashrender said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
@Dashrender said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
As for business, you have O365, are you looking to dump that?
It's $16/mo/user for the SharePoint and MS Office features that are used for only this documentation. That's a very heavy price tag for something that isn't as nice and useful as a wiki.
It's that much? On the E plans?
I will have to see if I have access to OneNote on SharePoint on my Business plan account.
Yes. Email is $4. E3 is $20. Difference for Sharepoint with MS Office is $16.
-
Sure but my $5 or $6/m/u plan gives me SharePoint.... So I don't need the $20/m/u account...
-
So MediaWiki lacks robust access controls. That's a major failing.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
So MediaWiki lacks robust access controls. That's a major failing.
That is a big deal. We have contractors that work on a specific client. With SharePoint I can give them access to only what I want them to see. Not all our client data.
-
The OneNote app itself is free... So it's just a matter of connecting the free app to the Business version of O365's SharePoint.
-
@Minion-Queen said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
So MediaWiki lacks robust access controls. That's a major failing.
That is a big deal. We have contractors that work on a specific client. With SharePoint I can give them access to only what I want them to see. Not all our client data.
Yup, and lots of wikis have it, just not MediaWiki.
-
@Dashrender said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
The OneNote app itself is free... So it's just a matter of connecting the free app to the Business version of O365's SharePoint.
Free and not available on all OSes. So that's useless in many cases. You just added whole new costs to get the "free" piece.
-
@Dashrender said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
So it's just a matter of connecting the free app to the Business version of O365's SharePoint.
I'm not aware of that working. Have you tried that?
-
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
@Dashrender said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
The OneNote app itself is free... So it's just a matter of connecting the free app to the Business version of O365's SharePoint.
Free and not available on all OSes. So that's useless in many cases. You just added whole new costs to get the "free" piece.
You mean there's no app for Linux... That the only one where there is no fat client. And I would guess you could use the web version there.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
@Dashrender said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
So it's just a matter of connecting the free app to the Business version of O365's SharePoint.
I'm not aware of that working. Have you tried that?
I will tonight.
-
@Dashrender said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
@Dashrender said in Ideas for ITSP and MSP Internal and Customer Documentation:
The OneNote app itself is free... So it's just a matter of connecting the free app to the Business version of O365's SharePoint.
Free and not available on all OSes. So that's useless in many cases. You just added whole new costs to get the "free" piece.
You mean there's no app for Linux... That the only one where there is no fat client. And I would guess you could use the web version there.
But the web version is $16/mo.
-
Looking at DokuWiki. Have not used it in a very long time. Looks like it might do stuff better than MediaWiki these days.
