Having worked for the Defense Department and now at $work I have always had to work on the "free" side to get things accomplished. At both places I have used Word Processing documents to handle documentation as it was the only tool that everyone had. At $work I inherited a ton of documentation written in Troff (actually EROFF, an enhanced version) and found a way to convert them to html documents.
You could go through your docs and convert them to PDF and then have them as links in whatever Wiki software you use. That is what I did with some of my docs that were in a format that I cold convert in a script. While at DoD we used a Gopher server (I guess I am showing my age) since each user had the proper software on their PC and it was just as easy to put the doc in the server tree and then the user would see the tree and be able to open it. That lacks any search capabilities but it got the job accomplished. And they couldn't edit the document on the server. I am currently trying MediaWiki and so far it seems easy enough to handle and may work. I am going to look a Twiki (twiki.org) which was a suggested earlier (I think) >>> "Johnson, Jonathon W Mr CTR USA TRADOC USA" <jonathon.john...@us.army.mil> 3/17/2010 7:15 AM >>> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: FOUO On Tue, 16 Mar 2010, da...@lang.hm wrote: > I would like to add to this that when you don't have good documentation to > start with, one of the best ways of keeping things in that state is to be > overly picky about the format of the documentation. On a side note of the same topic, most all of our documentation we have now is currently in Word format. It was kind of the standard to just create a Word document for whatever menial task and then whenever a user had the problem, I simply sent it to them. Most of our website use training is in Word as well. Right now, our documentation is quite lacking and due to several upgrades I did on our intranet, all of our other paper based documentation is now completely out of date. As yet, I've not found a good way to convert the Word stuff yet. Copying and pasting is turning into a disaster since quite a bit of these documents are either step by step ordered lists or have many screenshots and/or tables involved. I guess my question boils down too: is there a "good" way to convert Word into a wiki format? I'm planning/testing a few implementations of wiki software's out there to centralize and allow searchability of our documentation, but so far none quite meet what I'd like to see: where users can search without having to login, but my other sysadmins have logins and can delve into a deeper part of the site to see the other stuff I don't want users playing with and it must be free; stuff like that. Has anyone found any particularly good wiki software? Currently so far I've tried quite a few, but none seem to quite meet what I'd like (ie. Screwturn wiki allows for ACL's, but they are awkward to handle and their categories can't be used globally. You must recreate them for each "namespace" you create. The administration screens have little to no documentation on them themselves, so each change to the site must be tested and then documented itself which I find to be rather unhelpful to solving the problem lol). Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: FOUO John J. Boris, Sr. JEN-A-SyS Administrator Archdiocese of Philadelphia "Remember! That light at the end of the tunnel Just might be the headlight of an oncoming train!" _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
