[c-nsp] OT: Network documentation tool

[Alex Balashov]

I've always used TWiki for this since my ISP days, turned onto it by a 
colleague.

It's a little difficult to wrap one's head around at first, since it's 
one of those wikis where administering it involves editing parts of 
certain pages (metawiki!).  But I have found that it's the best wiki for 
business purposes.  There's a great plugin ecosystem, including my 
favourite - a plugin to generate PDFs (branded cover sheets, tables of 
contents, etc.) from the pages, and all sorts of other neat stuff.  Lets 
me create and produce stylish, professional-looking network information 
sheets for turn-ups and installs for customers in a few minutes or less, 
since the underlying content is just some lines of simple wiki markup. 
There are also quite a few WYSIWYG editing plugins for documents, so if 
you want, you don't even have to learn wiki markup -- including a nice 
one to edit tables in a spreadsheet-like way, which is uniquely handy 
for managing IP address space information and other tabular data common 
in the network world in a shared way.

It's very good for managing changes and collaboration, and includes 
e-mail notification and summary of changes to all applicable parties. 
The content architecture is also modular; it allows you to set up "webs" 
(essentially, sub-wikis) that have their own distinct cosmetic styles, 
permissions, global preferences, etc., so it's a handy way to easily 
contain multiple wikis for different departments and/or levels of 
administrative and managerial privilege.  We have a management wiki that 
regular employees don't have access to that contains contracts/financial 
information/sensitive customer data/etc. and another wiki for everyone 
else, and all this was quite simple to do.

Just my 2 cents.

Peter Rathlev wrote:

> Kind of OT, but hopefully someone has an opinion anyway. :-)
> 
> I'm looking for the perfect documentation tool for network
> documentation. We already have tools to map out the network and lots of
> management tools, but what I'm looking for is something like a
> repository to store and update all the written documentation, like
> procedures and so on.
> 
> We've been looking at different Wikis, among others the Mediawiki suite,
> and it looks promising but in my eyes seem a little much when we could
> cope with somthing much simpler. We've also looked at document
> repositories like Owl. We've even looked at Sharepoint. None of these
> tools seem to be just right though.
> 
> What do people use to store documentation? Currently we use a CIFS share
> but this seems clumsy at best.
> 
> Any input is appreciated. :-)
> 
> Regards,
> Peter
> 
> 
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-- 
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
Web     : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel     : (+1) (678) 954-0670
Direct  : (+1) (678) 954-0671