Knowledge Sharing

I was wondering if anyone had some ideas for knowledge sharing? My company consist of a small team of helpdesk engineers and field engineers. The problem I see (I'm fairly new) is that a lot of guys have specific knowledge that can come in handy when working with our customers. Currently we have runbooks with customer information (login creds, server information, network information, and support numbers for software/circuits), but we still run into information that sometimes only one guy knows. So how do you guys share that type of information? Often you wouldn't know you need it and then while working a ticket you get "oh so and so has pretty good knowledge of <this or that>". Thanks in advance!

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Comments

eMeS

In my experience this is never a problem that is solved with a tool.

Knowledge sharing is something that either an organization encourages, or it doesn't.

Many tools do (or claim to do) knowledge sharing, but I've yet to see the tool be the limiting factor. In fact, knowledge sharing can happen with even the most rudimentary tools. Rather, this seems to be for the most part a cultural problem that takes effort and time to adopt in an organization.

MS

Kaminsky

Another aspect is the techies willingness to divulge key information. There are certain types of IT techies that guard their knowledge very closely out of fear in order to protect their position.

You could look at company wide Sharepoint but it mainly comes down to the companie's policies on capturing this and making it available to certain sections of staff. Management have to enforce this constant gathering of information and keeping what is already available up to date as well.

It might seem a little task but it requires a lot of constant effort and willingness of the staff to give it out.

the_Grinch

Valid points. I am lucky in that the team we have there are no issues with sharing the information. It really comes down to who has the info and trying to track them down for it. Thanks guys!

dynamik

If it's a small group effort, and you don't want to setup Sharepoint, just setup your own wiki with MediaWiki. That's what we have here. I have a personal one at home too.

tpatt100

Setting up a wiki in the labs is a project I have listed for this summer. Mainly it's for me because I forget stuff

darkerosxx

dynamik wrote: »

If it's a small group effort, and you don't want to setup Sharepoint, just setup your own wiki with MediaWiki. That's what we have here. I have a personal one at home too.

QFT

Set up the wiki of your choice and encourage everyone to document how to manage systems/tasks/whatever because it will "ease their workload" over time.

arwes

A wiki would be great. When you come across something that's not in there, just add it!

kalebksp

dynamik wrote: »

If it's a small group effort, and you don't want to setup Sharepoint, just setup your own wiki with MediaWiki. That's what we have here. I have a personal one at home too.

I vastly prefer MediaWiki over SharePoint for this sort of thing. The change tracking, comments, uniform appearance are great benefits. (Those may be possible in SharePoint as well, but I haven't seen them.) The only problem I have with it is the lack of good access control.

RobertKaucher

kalebksp wrote: »

I vastly prefer MediaWiki over SharePoint for this sort of thing. The change tracking, comments, uniform appearance are great benefits. (Those may be possible in SharePoint as well, but I haven't seen them.) The only problem I have with it is the lack of good access control.

All those features are available in SharePoint.

rsutton

The runbooks are a good way to start. As far as other information goes, you may just need to ask for it as needed. You can't expect others to document everything in their brains on the off chance something in there may be used later since as you said you often don't know what you need until it is needed. Developing good communication channels with others goes a long way in this industry.

Hyper-Me

I think the biggest challenge is getting people to participate. At my last (govt) job, we tried a Wiki, another open source product, and WSS 3.0 and noone cared about any of them and they all failed due to lack of participation.

dynamik

tpatt100 wrote: »

Setting up a wiki in the labs is a project I have listed for this summer. Mainly it's for me because I forget stuff

Run XAMPP on a Truecrypt encrypted thumb drive. You can get that setup in like 15 minutes and have a portable wiki with you wherever you go. Leave a small unencrypted partition on the thumb drive for a stand-alone version of Truecrypt.

astorrs

dynamik wrote: »

Run XAMPP on a Truecrypt encrypted thumb drive. You can get that setup in like 15 minutes and have a portable wiki with you wherever you go. Leave a small unencrypted partition on the thumb drive for a stand-alone version of Truecrypt.

Great idea

Silentsoul

dynamik wrote: »

Run XAMPP on a Truecrypt encrypted thumb drive. You can get that setup in like 15 minutes and have a portable wiki with you wherever you go. Leave a small unencrypted partition on the thumb drive for a stand-alone version of Truecrypt.

Very cool. Rep for you.

Something i found while messing around with dynamiks idea.
DokuWiki on a Stick [splitbrain.org]

Also XP (windows in general i think) does not do multiple partitions on removable media.