[kyrotomia]

Hi,

Let me put in a little context first. I am the lead developper at a small web development company; 8 people. There is 3 programmers, the others are designers and project leaders, but they are also including in my "question" here.

I am trying to find a way (i.e. software) to easily share and find information in the company. There is some stuff we do over and over again, and I have yet to find something that really makes it easy to gather and find the info. Example of what I would like to share :

• A HTML select including all countries
  
• What tax rates is applicable for state XYZ
  
• PHP snippet for doing XYZ

Does any of you struggle with this too? Maybe you guys have some tips of your own?

Thank you for sharing

[BenignDesign]

Code repository?

[kyrotomia]

BenignDesign, on 26 November 2012 - 12:09 PM, said:

Code repository?

That's where I am having trouble including the designers and project leader. I am not looking to only share code, but also general information, such as tax rates for a given state or a in-house tutorial for setting imap on outlook 2012...

[modi123_1]

A custom wiki hosted internally... or a sharepoint site should disperse company info.

https://en.wikipedia...f_wiki_software

http://sharepoint.mi...es/default.aspx

[jon.kiparsky]

modi123_1, on 26 November 2012 - 11:17 AM, said:

or a sharepoint site should disperse company info.

We've had very bad luck with sharepoint, and so has just about everyone I've ever talked to, including the sharepoint consultant who makes a lot of money minimizing the damage that awful product does to our business.

Can't recommend it.

Repository is a good answer for anything that isn't a binary. Word files, no. XML, yes. GIFs, no. Scribus/Inkscape? Yes. Documentation can live in a repo as long as it's in a responsible format. DocBook works well, although it takes a lot of time to make it look good.
If your tax rates are in a spreadsheet, export them as CSV and throw them in the repo. HTML and PHP, obviously, are repo-suitable.
Your main issue is going to be organizing the content so it's possible to find stuff. Be a little careful there, since you're not likely to go back and clean it up, despite your intentions.

[creativecoding]

Code repository... with a wiki!

I would suggest using Git with Github. Github offers a whole bunch of features that your whole team can use even if they're not developers. They have a wiki, bug issues (which you can assign to certain people to fix), graphs to view your top contributors, and a bunch of other stuff.

It's imperative that your developers learn everything about git as for it is quite possibly one of THE most useful tools in a developers toolkit.

Here are some sites that offer step-by-step instructions and help:
http://gitimmersion.com/
http://try.github.com/

[modi123_1]

I've worked on share point and the companies I have worked for all use it with minimal fuss. I wonder what was being abused for the install. Ha.

[kyrotomia]

Thanks for the suggestion everyone, keep 'em coming! />

I stumbled on this a few days back :

http://programs.edch...ions/code-bank/ . I just set it up and it looks promising; but that only solves sharing code.

About github, I have an aversion for everything that is not self-hosted, paranoing about the fact that one morning it could be gone. I know... github is huge, but still. Does anyone have any experience with http://gitlabhq.com/ ?

This post has been edited by kyrotomia: 26 November 2012 - 09:59 AM

[no2pencil]

modi123_1, on 26 November 2012 - 11:17 AM, said:

A custom wiki hosted internally...

I installed media wiki for my company. It houses billing information, address information, distributors, logins, all kinds of fun, boring, paperwork stuff.

[jon.kiparsky]

Shouldn't be a problem to set up a locally hosted repo with whatever VCS you use. It won't have all of the bells and whistles of github, but that's kind of what you get.

[creativecoding]

kyrotomia, on 26 November 2012 - 08:57 AM, said:

Thanks for the suggestion everyone, keep 'em coming! />/>

I stumbled on this a few days back :

http://programs.edch...ions/code-bank/ . I just set it up and it looks promising; but that only solves sharing code.

About github, I have an aversion for everything that is not self-hosted, paranoing about the fact that one morning it could be gone. I know... github is huge, but still. Does anyone have any experience with http://gitlabhq.com/ ?

Of course your self-hosted things aren't secure either. Don't forget that everyone's hardware is prone to failure, including yours. If I were you I would setup a local Git repository (including that gitlab thing - that looks useful), and then make weekly backups to a private Github repository. Difference between you and them is they get paid tons of dollars to keep their user's code safe

[jon.kiparsky]

creativecoding, on 26 November 2012 - 12:08 PM, said:

Difference between you and them is they get paid tons of dollars to keep their user's code safe />/>

Other difference is the bacon and eggs difference: they're involved, like the chicken. You're committed, like the pig.

You have two risks to manage. Both are low-likelihood, high consequence. On the one hand, your hosted repo could fail, but on the other hand, your locally hosted repo could fail. Evaluate and take best action - either use a hosted setup and trust their backups, or host your own under the same data security you're using for everything else that would kill you to lose.

Or, use a hosted repo and maintain a fork locally, as CC suggests. But weekly backups? You want to lose a week's work? Use a commit hook and backup every commit!

This post has been edited by jon.kiparsky: 26 November 2012 - 10:20 AM

[kyrotomia]

creativecoding, on 26 November 2012 - 01:08 PM, said:

Of course your self-hosted things aren't secure either. [...] Difference between you and them is they get paid tons of dollars to keep their user's code safe />

In my case, it is not so much about the uptime / privacy as it is about the "ownership". While self-hosted, I can turn around and copy my data to another system / software, and if I crash, it's my problem. When using something such as github, if they decide to "shut down and never come back", I'm screwed. I think it's a fantastic platform and using it myself for personnal stuff, but I wouldn't rely on it for my business stuff.