Organization and reference tools
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@JaredBusch said:
@ryanblahnik said:
@JaredBusch said:
Wiki's are horrible for general users.
I'd been thinking entirely of what you like for your own personal use.
But it'd be interesting to see what's worked for everyone for others too.
For my own personal use? I would setup a forum because I am used to them and they support syntax I have long been used to.
The problem is I would never set something up for my self. Well I probably would, but I would not use it well. I am not motivated well when it comes to that kind of thing.
To follow this out a little further, it sounds like maybe "email search + Google + knowing the location of the document that has what you need" might make anything else mostly unnecessary for you anyway?
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@ryanblahnik said:
For me, Windows 8 and 10 don't represent anything that has a lot of reasons to stay dominant for a long time.
It is a very limited scope that has it as dominant. Windows is dominant in the business desktop world but losing ground at a crazy pace. Many of the biggest players (Google, Facebook, Oracle, IBM, many investment banks) have left Windows on the desktop. Apple, of course, is the biggest and doesn't use it. And the California start up world Windows barely exists at all. I've seen the same in NY but not as dramatically. More and more existing and traditional businesses are either no longer pure Windows or not Windows-focused.
And in the consumer space, Windows is no longer the top selling category of laptops for over a year now.
So while there is a lot of Windows legacy out there, Windows as the key player is limited to desktop and limited to business and several categories have moved away even within that space. Five years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Today, that Windows is going to be in a shop is no longer a plausible assumption.
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@scottalanmiller said:
We've used several things over the years. pmWiki and MediaWiki have probably been the strongest solutions but the most difficult for users to learn, for some reason, even though they use the same markdown as this forum, which does not seem to pose the same issues.
SharePoint's Wiki is a bit more WYSIWYG but takes more effort as it tends to mangle text if you don't know what to do. And the platform is much slower unless you invest tons more hardware.
OneNote is the best "document based" system but is problematic. It's extremely difficult to organize and results in document sprawl. It's a slow, cumbersome system to work with. The idea that you make a different "document" for different topics makes for almost certainly disorganized information.
Of the three wikis you mentioned, I only have some experience with SharePoint. It seemed like I had to find kind of special ways to manage a couple pretty basic things like anchor links, but like you said it's also pretty straightforward if everything's kept real simple.
I guess I like the idea of OneNote better than I like using it. It seems like I've tried to give it more of a shot a few times.
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@ryanblahnik said:
I guess I like the idea of OneNote better than I like using it. It seems like I've tried to give it more of a shot a few times.
We use it extensively but it doesn't scale. It's awesome when you have very limited data. Once you get to the point that you need to search for things it starts to break down. OneNote is designed around single users doing braindumps and when used for lots of people it is way too easy to become a disorganized mess. And data is likely to duplicate and become impossible to maintain.
pmWiki is great if you want to put very little effort into it and want a decent wiki. MediaWiki is screaming fast and gets tons of maintenance and scales bigger than you could possibly go but means that you have to maintain it a little and run MySQL or whatever behind it. It's not bad but it isn't trivial either.
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If you are making personal documentation just for you to use, OneNote is going to be by far the easiest because you don't need to explain everything that you do to someone else. And you'll have most of the metadata in your own brain to keep track of what is where. But if you need to work with other people, a wiki is likely going to be far easier for everyone.
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The other thing is, if it's not web-based, it's not likely I can enter something into my phone quickly when I remember it, and have it fit right into the whole. Or maybe have a lot of its functions persist in a tablet or phone interface, and still have enough to it that it's valuable enough to run on and add to in a desktop OS too.
I can't say I've messed with mobile Office enough to say why it's not that. Maybe what I'm really trying to say is I should just get all Macs and iDevices..
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OneNote works well across most devices as long as you are doing your storage of it as expected - like of OneDrive for Business.
Most wikis will work fine on mobile devices. WikiPedia works everywhere and that's MediaWiki so that's an easy test.
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I will agree that a wiki is simpler to manage for multiple users than One Note, but more of a pain for those users to use (it's easy to manage documentation for many users when no one uses it but you, cause they can't stand using it). One Note is a great platform, easy to use, and very powerful; wherein lies the danger. Any and every user has the ability to misuse it and make a total mess. That's the thing that makes it tough to keep organized. If you have many people accessing the data, but a single manager (entry of new data), it's a great system.
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On the Windows/other OS debate: I work with random SMB's almost daily, and in my own personal experience, I come across a very small percentage that are not 80-100% Windows-based. For virtualization, I see a very strong majority that are VMware. Sure, there are some neck-bearded, tree-hugging, Starbucks-sipping hipster dorks out in California doing start-ups on all Macs, but I don't take them seriously anyway. In the world I touch day in and day out, they are slightly less significant than the Linux-only ponytail crowd... which is all but non-existent.
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@art_of_shred said:
On the Windows/other OS debate: I work with random SMB's almost daily, and in my own personal experience, I come across a very small percentage that are not 80-100% Windows-based.
Products like Unitrends, Synology, ReadyNAS, FreePBX, Elastix, etc. bring in Linux where shops still think that they are Windows shops even when much of their core workloads are on Linux servers.
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Text files. Nothing beats never having to worry about compatibility or exporting.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
On the Windows/other OS debate: I work with random SMB's almost daily, and in my own personal experience, I come across a very small percentage that are not 80-100% Windows-based.
Products like Unitrends, Synology, ReadyNAS, FreePBX, Elastix, etc. bring in Linux where shops still think that they are Windows shops even when much of their core workloads are on Linux servers.
Using a Unitrends appliance in an all-Windows environment hardly equals "much of their core workloads" on Linux.
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@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
On the Windows/other OS debate: I work with random SMB's almost daily, and in my own personal experience, I come across a very small percentage that are not 80-100% Windows-based.
Products like Unitrends, Synology, ReadyNAS, FreePBX, Elastix, etc. bring in Linux where shops still think that they are Windows shops even when much of their core workloads are on Linux servers.
Using a Unitrends appliance in an all-Windows environment hardly equals "much of their core workloads" on Linux.
How often do you find backup appliances being installed in shops that do not also have storage appliances?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
On the Windows/other OS debate: I work with random SMB's almost daily, and in my own personal experience, I come across a very small percentage that are not 80-100% Windows-based.
Products like Unitrends, Synology, ReadyNAS, FreePBX, Elastix, etc. bring in Linux where shops still think that they are Windows shops even when much of their core workloads are on Linux servers.
Using a Unitrends appliance in an all-Windows environment hardly equals "much of their core workloads" on Linux.
How often do you find backup appliances being installed in shops that do not also have storage appliances?
Quite often. More than 50%.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
On the Windows/other OS debate: I work with random SMB's almost daily, and in my own personal experience, I come across a very small percentage that are not 80-100% Windows-based.
Products like Unitrends, Synology, ReadyNAS, FreePBX, Elastix, etc. bring in Linux where shops still think that they are Windows shops even when much of their core workloads are on Linux servers.
of course that's correct, but the end users (or even admins) aren't interacting with the Linux stuff at all - so as far as most of them might know it could be Windows or OSX or Linux.. who cares, because they never manage that part of the system.
This reminds of the other day when you asked me if the receptionist is bragging about her company having a SAN. If you're not managing that part of the system, it might as well not even exist when it comes to looking at what a company is running OS wise because it just doesn't matter.
When that company running a unitrends box who mostly has Windows desktops looks to move to Mac desktops (example only) they aren't going to say - but the unitrends is Linux.. instead they are going to say.. hey, does Unitrends backup Macs? and move on based on the answer... not caring what underlying OS is on that box.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
On the Windows/other OS debate: I work with random SMB's almost daily, and in my own personal experience, I come across a very small percentage that are not 80-100% Windows-based.
Products like Unitrends, Synology, ReadyNAS, FreePBX, Elastix, etc. bring in Linux where shops still think that they are Windows shops even when much of their core workloads are on Linux servers.
of course that's correct, but the end users (or even admins) aren't interacting with the Linux stuff at all - so as far as most of them might know it could be Windows or OSX or Linux.. who cares, because they never manage that part of the system.
That's what I suspect. Just as tons of companies report that they don't use cloud computing even many years after moving key workloads there, tons of companies report that they are all or nearly all Windows long after tons of key workloads have moved to Linux.
I suspect many people running Windows on Azure have no idea that there is Linux in the infrastructure that they are using.
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How would a company not know they are using Cloud resources? Obviously if you're disconnected from those things you don't know.. but if you are managing them.. then you know.
it's not the same as saying you don't have any linux in house when your using a Unitrends box. In that case you don't know what's under the hood. But to go cloud - You know you moved your processing/data/whatever somewhere else (unless you have a self hosted cloud)...
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@Dashrender said:
How would a company not know they are using Cloud resources? Obviously if you're disconnected from those things you don't know.. but if you are managing them.. then you know.
You'd be shocked how often people don't know. It is estimated by many sources that most companies don't know what they are using any more.
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@Dashrender said:
it's not the same as saying you don't have any linux in house when your using a Unitrends box. In that case you don't know what's under the hood. But to go cloud - You know you moved your processing/data/whatever somewhere else (unless you have a self hosted cloud)...
Many people do not know this. Most people do not know this. Remember that when moving to hosted you might not involve IT. Hosted services are used by many companies to bypass IT. Or they do it by accident. Of IT people don't know what they've done.
It's far more common than you would imagine.
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I never considered the by passing of IT.. so sure, our new EHR is 'cloud' hosted... so we're using it I guess.
