I was just put in charge of our department\'s documentations. It is a mess right

Question

I was just put in charge of our department's documentations. It is a mess right now (300+). We have documentations for every in-house tools created with Microsoft Office (MSWord, Excel and Access) since 2006 and made in Excel and Word. And those documents can hold user how-to information, technical information or VBA/SQL information for the programmers. My challenge is to put all those documents together and be able to search all of them for specific word(s). Like if I want to search for a table name, I would type "tblSomething" and I would get a result of all documents with that specific word and/or even a list of which tool is using that table.

So basically I am looking for some kind of document manager. I don't mind if I have to redo/copy/paste those documents into something else if needed.

I am ready to look into free stuff or paying ones. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Explanation / Answer

Let me introduce you to my friend: Confluence

Confluence is a cloud-based product (but can also be installed on a server) to allow collaboration with teammates from anywhere with the ability to set permissions. Using Confluence allows you to centrally locate all of the documents into one area instead of having to use server shares, multiple documents, emailing documents, etc. It allows users to collaborate to improve documents as well.

You can organize the documents into "Spaces", and then maintain a hierarchical paging system. It's simple to setup and comes with "boiler plates" for creating new documents.

Users are also able to create file lists and upload files if necessary. Confluence can use the search feature to search all spaces, pages, and even non-binary files (such as the files you had mentioned).

Of course, there are a ton of features I have omitted. To learn more, visit https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence

Atlassian also has other tools which your programmers may actually benefit from. JIRA for management (for Agile, Kanban, etc), Bamboo (for building, testing, QA, etc.), Bitbucket for a central code repository... and the best part is that they all work together. NOTE: I am not an Atlassian employee, just an advocate.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse I
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.