You’re in a non-infotech company and there are tons of procedures are references spewed around that take ages to search, collect info and then get on with your work. I work for an engineering company and I can tell you the enormous benefits of knowledge management. We have comparative data, previous projects history, analysis procedures, specifications, industry standards and practices, vendor data, academic and conference papers and a ton of such other stuff.

Gateway is my effort in streamlining that chaos. It runs through my company’s veins and the benefits are so very obvious. I’ve been running a blog software to run and manage the content and that is exactly the problem. This should have been a collaborative system. A system like this using a blog software tends to become a single admin-centric, which I hate. If I’m away due to some reason, things wait for me. Which is why, I’ve been seriously looking at wikis to port the data. One of the major issues I’ve noticed with wikis is that while everything else is generally good, they have such poor backup support.

Look at this comparision of wikis (Tools: Backup section). You’ll know what I mean. What are guys working on wiki projects thinking? Install and forget? No! There are a hundred possibilities for a crash and another hundred for data loss. While Mediawiki supports a MySQL dump, Instiki goes a step further. It provides an export option to convert to plain html files, which can be burnt on a CD and taken along without losing your wiki functionality away from your computer and away from your network. That’s wonderful.

I wonder what do companies like Google and Microsoft use for their knowledge management.

Update: So why not Instiki? Well, it runs on Ruby, which is fine, but not my other apps and pages that need to be served via a PHP/MySQL system. I don’t like a hybrid system, too much maintenance. So, I guess I have to let go of my copy to CD fetish that Instiki provides as an export option. I hope such functionality is added to popular wiki engines in future.

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