Organization and reference tools
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What method(s) do you like for organizing info and maintaining references?
I like a lot about Office, until it's the only method used and everything's spread across dozens of documents. Being inflexible across mobile and Linux counts against it too, especially for OneNote.
I haven't really tried any mobile apps for that second reason either. And with some of the privacy concerns about apps like Evernote, I haven't been interested and never looked at them very closely, along with anything else that offers to suck everything into its cloud for me.
I tend to keep a handful of txt files and Office documents to keep track of a few different things, but without any other software to recommend, I guess that leaves wikis as probably my favorite overall.
Collabedit.com has been really handy a few times.
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@ryanblahnik
@scottalanmiller mentioned using a WIKI - Might look at something like this. -
@gjacobse said:
@ryanblahnik
@scottalanmiller mentioned using a WIKI - Might look at something like this.Wiki's are horrible for general users.
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Where is @scottalanmiller ? I would expect him to be up-voting and plastering crap all over this one. In fact, my brow raises as I ponder the possibility that @ryanblahnik could be a SAM-alias... but I know this must not be true. If it were, he would have already up-voted the OP! No shame...
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I HATE Wiki's. Not great for multiple types of documents and media.
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I'll second that. I have little respect for the uses of wikis, and I naturally dismiss anyone who bemoans anything not playing well with Linux. We live in a predominantly Windows business world (user-facing). Get used to it, or fight the uphill battle and be regarded as out-of-touch with the everyday in IT. I mean, I get the sentiments on both of those, but just give it up already; it's not going to happen.
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If you are technical, nothing seems to touch a wiki. Super duper simple to edit, works everywhere, simple to maintain. It has all of the things that you need to be productive.
If you are dealing with end users, you are just out of luck. They want editing to be so easy that they won't have to organize. This means.... that data is impossible to retrieve.
There is no simple answer. If you are dealing with end users, you have all of the issues that that brings with lack of organization.
But, in reality, if you are dealing with end users, in many cases you have to organize the data for them.
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@Minion-Queen said:
I HATE Wiki's. Not great for multiple types of documents and media.
That's the strength. Having multiple document types for your documentation is not a good thing in nearly all cases.
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@art_of_shred said:
Where is @scottalanmiller ? I would expect him to be up-voting and plastering crap all over this one. In fact, my brow raises as I ponder the possibility that @ryanblahnik could be a SAM-alias... but I know this must not be true. If it were, he would have already up-voted the OP! No shame...
And there he is...
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@art_of_shred said:
I'll second that. I have little respect for the uses of wikis...
The problem is is not disliking wikis. No one likes wikis. The problem is lacking another solution.
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@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.
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@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.
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@Minion-Queen said:
I HATE Wiki's. Not great for multiple types of documents and media.
This is one of my biggest issues with wikis too. If you can't have much more than upload dates for those documents, again it's a hassle keeping track of what's been updated and what's current, and again another solution wants to be the only solution but isn't complete enough to pull it off well.
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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.
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@art_of_shred said:
We live in a predominantly Windows business world (user-facing). Get used to it, or fight the uphill battle and be regarded as out-of-touch with the everyday in IT.
I wouldn't be confident Windows will still be that in twenty years.
Not saying it definitely won't, and I'm not trying to crusade against Microsoft at all. I just like to try to keep encountering interesting tools that work easily. For me, Windows 8 and 10 don't represent anything that has a lot of reasons to stay dominant for a long time.
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@ryanblahnik said:
I wouldn't be confident Windows will still be that in twenty years.
In California it feels like Windows is the tertiary player already. Mac is dominant on the desktop and Linux follows it up.
Linux has been dominant on the server side for a long, long time now. And it wasn't Windows that it unseated.
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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.
