Implementing a Knowledge Management Solution?

dirtkilla asks: "I work for a large health care software vendor in our remote hosting area. Recently we've been asked to look into a Knowledge Management/Doc Repository type solution to implement. I have researched and installed a few options: C-arbre and TikiWiki. C-Arbre is lacking in documentation and Tiki seems pretty bloated. I'm facing people pushing to implement Microsoft Share Point, I'd much rather go towards an open non-Microsoft solution." How would you organize a variety of information, both digital and non-digital, into an easy to maintain system that just about anyone can use?

"We currently log all our technical info/instructions etc in Microsoft Word docs, emails and scribbles on paper. Share Point seems to be a logical solution for our collection of Microsoft Word documents, however I'm not much for loading Word to view something that could be displayed or edited in a browser.

I really like the Wiki idea, and found a VB script to convert Word to Wiki. However large documents may be a pain to do this with, and some people may not be comfortable with such a change. I can upload documents to the site and tie them to a particular page/File Gallery but I'm not sure about search functions searching the text of the document. I'd also like a way to export info, possibly to RTF/XML/HTML or some format that Word can read/edit/save and then import to the Knowledge Share.

I was hoping someone would have some advice/ideas/experience with getting this setup. Ultimately we'd like Searching, Grouping, LDAP authentication, Calendar functionality (we use Outlook so who knows), document storage, and Wiki functionality. It is the hope that something useful and user friendly which non-technical people would be comfortable using."

Plone 2

[foniksonik]

I'd recommend Plone v 2.0

WhyPlone [plone.org]

It incorporates the Wiki features you mentioned, has support for authenticating against Active Directory and LDAP, even SMB if that is what you use and it has a fully implemented ACL system with granular permissions which includes adding files/documents as content and setting global, group and user specific permissions on each file or on folders "with inheritance".

Not to mention one of the best documented APIs around for any OS CMS.

Check it out, it is very robust and scales well.

Opentext Livelink

[Tux2000]

Don't re-invent the wheel. Get a customizable product and an expert that can customize it.

I suggest Livelink. Well, it's not free. It costs money. It may cost lots of money if you want all those nice features. It's not open source. But I have enough Karma to burn. ;-)

Web page: http://www.opentext.com/ [opentext.com]

The consulting company I work for is based on knowledge. Fast, reliable and secure (permisson based) access to archived knowledge is mission critical. So there never was a problem buying the software we need for business, no matter what it costs.

My job is not Livelink. But I work in the same room as our Livelink expert. So I collect a little bit of knowlegde about Livelink. I'm the one he asks for Unix and network tricks.

Livelink has a document management (that's the main part), team rooms, workstreams, and a lot of other nice features. For details, have a look at the web page. Livelink is a core server, extended by a lot of scripts (in a custom language named Oscript), and a tiny CGI that passes requests from the webserver to the core server. If you own a development kit, you can customize nearly every aspect of Livelink, and you can see lots of code written by Opentext. So if you have the money, you can at least see most of the sources.

We use three dual-CPU W2K machines with Apache 1.3.x as Web and application servers, a fourth dual-CPU W2K machine for the indexer and search engine, a Sun 420 running Solaris 9 for the database (Oracle), and Linux Virtual Server [linuxvirtualserver.org] (LVS) as load balancer for the webservers. We have about 1500 users all around the world.

Why so many servers? Most of the time, one web server is completely idle. Opentext would recommend a single server setup, and that would be sufficient. But we have demanding consultants, our problems are response time and availability. We have some queries that block a server for a while. So we need at least two servers. The third server is for load peaks and for downtimes of one of the other servers. Index and search also need a lot of power that would block a single machine, so it's placed on the fourth server.

Why W2K? The most recent version of Livelink requires it.

Why Sun? Oracle on Windows simply sucks, the raw CPU power of the previous multi-CPU x86 database machine was larger than the one of the Sun machine, but Oracle runs much faster on the Sun. (Now all corporate databases are switched to a Oracle/Sun cluster, but that's a different story.)

Why LVS? Simple: It works. We tried a load-balancing software called Resonate, a really fitting name for a piece of software that should implement a control loop. We kicked it because it was hard to maintain and did not work reliably on our machines. We tried LVS on a really old desktop and it worked great, even if we tried really hard to confuse it. Now it has its own x86 server running Slackware [slackware.com], and we did not have a single second of trouble with it.

Why Apache? We used Netscape Enterprise Server / iPlanet. It had a pretty web-based config tool and much bloat, and it costs money. Apache does the same job for free, and its configuration is a simple text file that can be copied to the various servers. MS IIS has bugs. Lots of bugs. Its mouse controlled. We did not even think about a test system with the IIS.

Tux2000

Sharepoint might be an option

[Slugworth01]

As much as I would rather not admit it, Sharepoint isn't all that bad. We use it internally in my group as an alternative to a Livelink-based solution. For us, Sharepoint was free (due to our MS-oriented shop,) and I've heard that it is now included in Windows Server 2003. We're a Windows and MS Office house so we have the servers anyway. The Livelink solution is managed by our corporate IT group and we have to pay extra to set it up for our needs and then pay an allocation to our IT group to use it on a regular basis. We have local control and ownership over our W2K and W2003 servers. I realize not everyone has these kinds of economics but that's the hand we were dealt.

If you already have the MS Office infrastructure, Sharepoint integrates pretty well. MS Office documents in Sharepoint document libraries open in your IE browser and the Sharepoint tools for comments and discussions within documents integrate pretty nicely. You get the option to use a simple change management model.

Sharepoint lets you subscribe to just about any content in the Sharepoint web, giving you email notifications when things change. So for example, you save your draft design document (as a Word document) into a Sharepoint document library and send a request for review to a group of people, subscribe to the document, and when your reviewers make comments in your document, you know about it immediately. Works well.

There is a workflow capability, but you have to set it up in Frontpage. I didn't find this terribly useful or user friendly, but then again, what workflow system is?

All in all, it's at least worth taking a loot at. Granted, it's not free as in beer, and it helps to already be stuck with some MS infrastructure, and it helps to have some FP experience.

To state the obvious, in a perfect world I would be working in an OSS shop and would have experience with something like Zope and could tout it's benefits to you. But that's not the world I work in.

One other non OSS product you might want to look at is Documentum [documentum.com]. I've used this product as well, and if it weren't for some stupid PHB-like reasons, we might be using it instead of Sharepoint. It does the document management thing pretty well, has document management, revision control and workflows. I'd judge it to be more robust than Sharepoint in these areas.

Finally, just to preserve some OSS credibility and not sound like a total MS tool, I'm working on a port one of our applications that currently runs on OpenVMS and HP-UX to Linux to take advantage of the lower TCO and in response to customer requests for a non-proprietary platform solutions.

TWiki Rules

[n1ywb]

I'm currently testing TWiki for deployment in my company as an intranet content management system. I evaluated every major Wiki software before I settled on TWiki. The things that sold me where

• It's written in Perl, one of the few.
  
• It DOESN'T require MySQL (I'm a PSQL fan myself.)
  
• It has very good revision control support.
  

Most of the Wiki's I evaluated were written in PHP, which isn't my language of choice, mostly because I'm not familiar with it. Plus I love perl. I also have no experience with MySQL and it's not set up on my server so I didn't wan't to have to deal with that as a requirement for some silly wiki software. Finally it AMAZED me how many wiki applications lack ANY form of revision control. I mean, the wiki concept of openness is great and all, but when some kiddie pastes ascii goatse.cx over all my pages, I want to be able to roll back those revisions!!! TWiki uses good ole' RCS and has good tools for checking out old revisions, diffing different revision, and rolling back to an older revision.

Oracle Collaboraiton Suite

[Anonymous Coward]

My company just went through this.

You should check out the Oracle Collaboration Suite [oracle.com]. It's the new rave in collaboration software...everything is stored in an Oracle DB and interfaced through an application written on top of Oracle Application Server. Last time I checked, most every document format imaginable was index-able so the collab suite can run a credentials based search, create a quick html view (like cached documents on google), there's full ability to do check-in/check-out, and ability to create "workflow" processes. The main document interface is done over webdav [webdav.org] ( oss ) and drives can be mapped just like the old days.

Oh yeah, and it is designed to be a replacement for Exchange/Sharepoint...which means email, contacts, calendaring, and the like are all taken care of. The cost varies on size, but for my company it was about 40% that of a full blown MS collaboration solution (hardware, consulting, migration, software).

If you're into spending extra money, Sharepoint is a great product. I evaluated both, but it came down to security, reliability, and cost.

Wiki switching...

[Spoing]

I did some research a few months ago, attempting to get a group to use a Wiki, and one reasonable set of questions that kept on comming up were;

Do our current documents (MS Office) show up in the same basic format -- and can we use similar tools?

If we want to switch from one Wiki or CMS to another, how do we do it?

After some research, I found that for the basics it was simple;

The pages are typically HTML and can be bulk converted.

The formatting could be handled by using a fairly new browser and the 'rich text' edit extentions.

On the down side...

The number of Wikis with 'rich text' support was small.

1. The setup time for Twiki was excessive and complex; I never got a demo system set up unless I used the exact same base data files as the Twiki site and cut out the data from there. This violates CM procedures, so I couldn't get approval for Twiki.
2. The setup time for other Wikis was minor, though they tended to have very few of the features Twiki had.

Not all the content could be converted to/from other systems, so there would be some data loss.

Now that I'm on other projects, does anyone have tips/suggestions/resouces even if to say "thems da' breaks"?

I'd love to have something ready to go so that the struggle to get these tools used will not be so great. (If it is 'pretty' that would be a plus, as Twiki's default ugly almost killed it off during the first round of review.)

Wiki which searches MS Office Docs

[arethuza]

You could have a look at Perspective, an open source Wiki that uses Indexing Service for searching so can search MS Office documents and can be configured for Windows Integrated Authentication. Its early stage but GPL-ed and doesn't require a database (data is held in XML files). Find it at Perspective [high-beyond.com].

And yeah, I'm the author, so I am biased!