3 ms·
Internal company documentation and search is an interesting problem that I have been thinking a lot about. One big issue is that everyone knows its an issue, s
by ecshafer 5y ago
Internal company documentation and search is an interesting problem that I have been thinking a lot about.
One big issue is that everyone knows its an issue, so people add more places to store information, which inevitably becomes another place to search which makes it hidden, and then as things move there are inevitable dead links all over the place. We need an intranet to be an actual intranet with all information there, and properly indexed.
The biggest "solutions" here are also some of the worst offenders:
1. Google Drive / Microsoft Network Share / Drop Box Etc. These are filled with documents, some companies have more than one of these. These are places where information goes to die, and lives entirely in people's heads, so you have to talk to someone, have them find it, send you a link etc. If there is a search, its for the names and not the content. They are rarely in a good format or place to easily do a find | grep search.
2. Confluence is awful. Confluence is directly backwards, its information at the team level, instead of at the topic level.
3. Sharepoint purely awful. Its searched poorly, barely works.
4. Wikis, very few places uses these for some reason in favor of worse. A single source of truth wiki I think is the optimal place. Or if they do its like a MS Team Wiki or a Gitlab wiki that is broken off of all other places and not indexed so its disconnected.
- marcyb5st 5y agoTo be honest, Drive does a good job at indexing also the content of the documents. My gripe with it is that when I search something I get all the results of things that people shared with me directly or indirectly though groups. If I could have the option of searching only things that I actually accessed, or even edited/commented I would be really happy about it.
- bruhbruhbruh 5y agoI actually seem to have the opposite result. I seem to only be able to find documents that were shared with me, or that I accessed myself. I want to be able to find documents that I have not actually seen, yet have access to view. Confluence is a bit like this - i can search all of the spaces and get results from other parts of the org. but drive seems to push results to the top which are more localized to my immediate previous use
- systemvoltage 5y agoI always get lost in Google Drive. I don't even know what I am looking at in Google Drive. I wouldn't say, one of the worst UIs in existence, but it is hard to give any more credibility to it. After years of use, I still don't know what I own, what is shared with me, what others own, how are docs organized, etc. At least with dropbox, you have a folder structure. With Google, it's hidden somewhere.
- mft_ 5y agoTotally agree. It makes finding the right document far harder than a product from the company most associated with search in the world should make it. On the corporate Google Drive version I use at work you can choose to search only within your own drive, but it’s clunky to set up and you have remember to do it before you type in your search term - which is counter-intuitive. It would be much better if there a selection of filters appeared to apply to the search results - owner, drive, when I last accessed or edited (as you suggested), etc. (As an aside… don’t folks in Google use their own products and hit the same frustrations? It takes no more than a few days of using corporate Drive to run into this…)
- closeparen 5y agoConfluence also has a default-deny policy on editing, which I think is crazy especially in an internal enterprise context. If one of your employees is vandalizing wiki pages then you can see their name in the change history and fire them. Prior restraint makes no sense.
- mattm 5y agoI'm not sure if it's the default but I know it can be change. If your company has chosen to go that route, that's on the company, not on Confluence. Anyone can edit Confluence pages at my company.
- closeparen 5y agoSimilar defenses are made of JIRA. The thing is: the whole reason these products exist as distinct from their open source or practitioner-favored alternatives is their enterprise feature set, which is to say their affordances for being locked down and micromanaged. Buying Confluence and then running it wide open is a weird choice.