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."

Wakka Wiki

[JoeBaldwin]

Get a LAMPS solution with Wakka Wiki [wakkawiki.com]. The Wiki source comes to about 500kb, and can be infinitely customised. It's pretty damn cool...

TWiki

[Anonymous Coward]

I am new to the world of Wikis -- especially as an administrator. I was tired of keeping my notes in a giant text file though. It was growing to about 1mb and was difficult to deal with. I tried an application called "WikiPad" and it lacked a lot of flexibility that I wanted (and cost $12).

What I've done recently is deployed a TWiki/PostgreSQL/Apache solution. Because I'm stuck on a windows machien for a majority of the time where I am, I'm using the Cygwin solution. It eats up virtually no memory (apache consumes perhaps 7mb of RAM). I have a "web" in wiki for me under my name for everythign in the world that is at all related to my personal life. From taxes to contacts to stories about my life and todo lists and random pieces of data. I even have all of my important pdf manuals for various home products uploaded to the wiki database and all of my important software drivers and utilities archived in/on it. Then I have a wiki "web" for my work. So when I want work related things (technical notes, policies, files, resources, links, communications, contacts, todo lists, etc) I click on WORK when I want my personal life I click on ME.

It works pretty damn well and has lots of plugins. It's open source and free, too. TWiki, postgresql, cygwin and apache are all 100% free. Compare that to the closed-standard microsoft solution... I'll take the awesome extendable free one!

Hire someone to customize for your needs.

[Coventry]

My company just implemented something like this for a client - feature-wise, I mean. We didn't do LDAP support or calendaring, but most everything else is there. In fact, we had to remove many of the features we wrote because the client decided not to use them - such as the capability for discussions to hang off of a document or a folder within the system.

Anyway, Something like Plone may work for you. If you don't find something canned that seems to do what you want - or you think something like Plone could work with snowmen modifications - look into hiring someone to modify the system you think will work best for you. Most of the systems out there you will look at are free - meanwhile sharepoint isn't. Paying someone to modify OS software to meet your needs may be cheaper than the licensing fees for sharepoint! There is something to be said for integration with all of the MS Office tools - but then again, a move to Open Office (or star office) would be easier to push in your organization if you didn't rely upon MS-Office specific systems in cases such as this. That is a lot of money your company could save down the line that you'd completely write-off with sharepoint - it just wouldn't be an option.

Anyway, consider hiring a consulting firm to do the work for a fee less than the cost of a sharepoint system - you'll get exactly what you need, and not be tied into MS. Many sharepoint systems need customization work performed in order to 'fit' with a company's needs - so down the sharepoint road you could wind up with license fees _and_ development costs.

As for a firm to use - if you have a local favorite you use, give them a buzz. If you don't - which you probably don't, or you would of asked them their opinion already - then consider www.neurokode.com. Of course, I'm biased, I'm a half-owner of :) Then again, we did just do something very similar to this for another client - and code reuse saves you money. Oh, and no, we didn't use Plone - Zope wasn't an option for the client (which was annoying - I love python), so we wrote a custom PHP-mysql system for them, to which we retain the rights. We may open source it at some point - but right now the project is still in the bug-fix warranty period and we're more concerned with the clients needs.

For those who are curious, we used several open-source utilities (via command-line calling behind the scenes from PHP), such as doc2html, to provide automatic conversion of documents into usable and searchable strings for use in a full-text index within mysql. Thus, we gained the ability to search DOC, PDF, XLS and other types of files without requiring the files themselves to be changed. The original files were stored seperately and available for download to authorized users of the site.

Integrate it with your helpdesk

[unixbob]

Last year we did some research and looked into the various different helpdesk solutions that are available. Most of them were really expensive but we found Cerberus [cerberusweb.com] for $100. Although it is a ticketing system, it's also got a built in knowledgebase which is searchable on subject, keyword, content, etc. It may not be right for what you need (you don't say why you are implementing a knowledgebase) but it's very handy to have the answers to technical queries available in the same system that the helpdesk uses to record problem.

Why not Share Point???

[kill-9-0]

Why not go with Share Point? I'm not the world's biggest M$ fan, but this product works fairly well. It integrates well with all your requirements, has pretty wide spread industry use, and uses formats that people use and are familiar with. I understand people wanting to go with open software, but just blindly saying "no" to something simply because it's Microsoft isn't necessarily fair to your employer or clients. I think one of the things MS has done well, is it's Office Suite. If you find a better product that is open source, go ahead and use it, but don't discount a product, "just because" it's Microsoft. Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, so even Microsoft can occassionally do something right. I know this isn't the popular view here on /. but your employer does deserves you looking at all options.

Just my $0.02

Re:Plone 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Good link. I'm thinking of implementing it at home.

At the office we implemented VQWiki (because it was needed there and then). We also had a static HTML page system and tried to implement a PHPNuke based system. All of these were shot down by bloody management. Since we are a Java Software house, apparently we are not allowed to use any technology developed in other languages. My arse. There has been an internal project to create such a content system for the last two years and it is still completely unusable and basicly it's a piece of crap but that's what Management decided to use.

As a result, after two and a half years since we installed the first wiki site, we still don't have any CMS and no one cares. Bloody managers.

Re:Plone 2

[the eric conspiracy]

I would recommend Plone as well. It's the bee's knees. The technologies it runs on (Python and Zope) are absolutely top-notch as well.

Plone CMS on Unix

[morelife]

I would have been the first to tell you about Plone, but I was in bed and apparently others beat me to it:)

Plone is extremely flexible, and fast to production. I have now tested and have in production many instances, and have developed installation, backup rotation, and restoration scripts. The system virtually runs itself when set up, and users find it very intuitive.. Additionally it has very granular user/group control, allowing you to control who publishes what with very little effort.

Sharepoint might be good or not, but on the reason of licensing costs alone, I would choose Plone. You will pay zero dollars for world class CMS/knowledge base solution.

Plone has bunches of modules (products) and features you may find useful. Trouble ticketing system, news section, RSS feeds and RSS publishing, mailing lists production, galleries, forums for discussion, among others. In addition to many levels of undo so that you can correct any action taken if need be.

Another plus is you can cluster (again at no dollars) instances using Zeo, if you need robustness.

Plone looks professional, clean and slick. Plus it's super customizable. Take a look at csszengarden.com [csszengarden.com] and the various looks on the right, to get an idea of what can be acheived with CSS... and look at zopezen.org [zopezen.org] to see a real simple look that can be acheived on the skin. There's a lot you can do under the hood, or you can just leave it alone. It can easily be administered remotely. And I front end it with Apache and SSL, for a secure access solution.

The Plone community is friendly and responsive, but comprised of some serious Python hackers who probably expect you to come well versed up to a certain level.. Therefore I must second the idea mentioned before of engaging a professional to help you identify your needs now and going forward, and also you capabilities to narrow it down to the right solution for your company.

Re:must be java-based

[Felonius Thunk]

If it has to be, why not something like OpenCMS [opencms.org]? It's java-based and quite robust, though not nearly as feature-full as something like Plone.

Re:Wakka Wiki

[caseydk]

It depends on how you define knowledge management...

If someone means purely a document repository, then DocSearcher ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/docsearcher/ ) may take care of it.

If someone means purely a FAQ system, then a Wiki may be the way to go.

If someone means a collaborative suite, then EGroupWare ( http://www.egroupware.org/ ) may be the way to go.

If you just want discussion forums, then phpBB2 ( http://www.phpbb.com/ ) may be the way to go.

Personally, this sounds like a collaborative suite with a doc repository bolted on. I'd go with EGroupWare.

Re:Plone 2

[foniksonik]

Another option I'd recommend for straight CMS for intranet is Sitellite which is a commercial CMS gone GPL this year. It's still pretty early in it's Open Source life span but very mature. Some of the out of the box features are missing but the API is awesome and it's content publishing workflow is perfect for non-technical users. Oh yeah it is PHP/MySQL but uses a Java daemon for it's search index creator.

http://www.sitellite.org

Nobody mentioned DSpace (cursory search first)

[bob_calder]

from MIT.
Anyway take a gander around. There is:
dspace.mit.edu
and
dspace.org which is their portal, I guess.

Mediawiki

[nanobug]

I am surprised that no-one has mentioned Wikipedia's codebase, Mediawiki, which runs on a standard LAMP architecture.

We have installed it at our company and are finding it is perfect for Knowledge Management.

Just some of the features it has are:
- complete revision history of every article
- back links (what links here)
- watchlists
- preferences
- skins
- comprehensive link analysis
- namespaces
- editing assistant (buttons that turn selected text into a link, bold, italics, etc)
- customized pages
- pages inclusions
- many more
- and of course the simplicity and ease of editing that comes with a Wiki.

It has a dynamic mailing list, lots of developers (and hence improvements going on), and a vibrant community behind it.

Once you can convince managers to back it, you can't lose. Suggestion: install it and build it for a while before you show it to management, that way the content helps to show how useful the product is.