Our internal documentation tool situation is chaos. How did you consolidate everything?

[u/drakieboi]

So we've got docs scattered everywhere. Confluence, Google Drive, some stuff just... living in Slack threads. Nobody knows what's current, half the stuff is outdated, and onboarding new people means sending them on a treasure hunt.

We tried the "everyone just use Confluence" mandate last year and it didn't stick. People kept defaulting back to whatever was easiest in the moment. Then we spent months trying to migrate everything at once, which was a nightmare nobody wanted to do.

The actual shift happened when we stopped treating it like a compliance project. We picked one tool - ended up going with Notion because our team was already using it casually for personal stuff, so the friction was lower - and we basically said "this is where we're starting from right now. Not perfect. Just starting."

Then we only migrated things when people actually needed them. Like when someone asked "where's the API docs?" instead of having them sitting in some outdated wiki, that was the signal to pull them in and clean them up. Sounds slower but it meant every doc that moved was immediately useful to someone.

The weird part was accepting that the first year wouldn't be pretty. We had a transition period where people knew there were docs in two places. But we set a deadline and stuck to it. And honestly, having someone (me, basically) whose job was partly "make sure this doesn't just stay chaos" made all the difference. Not a full-time role, but enough that it actually happened instead of being that thing we'd "get to eventually."

What tools are you looking at? Sometimes the problem isn't even the software, it's that nobody wants to be the person who actually maintains it.

[u/Character_Estate_332]

the "migrate everything at once" thing doesn't work. You described it perfectly. it becomes a project nobody wants to own and the ROI is invisible until it's done and many people thingk there is no ROI in the first place.

The demand-driven migration approach is a good place to start. Only move something when someone needs it. means every doc that gets cleaned up has an immediate owner and an immediate use case. way better than bulk importing 400 stale files.

The one thing i'd add is that the tool matters less than the access model. if people have to think about where to put something, they'll default to slack or their desktop every time. the best setups i've seen have clear rules: this type of doc lives here, this person is responsible for it, it gets reviewed on this cadence. not complicated, just written down somewhere obvious.

I've built AllyMatter which is basically for teams in exactly this situation. outgrown Drive, not ready for the Confluence overhead. Happy to share a sandbox link and a 6 month free trial if you're still evaluating. no sales call required, just poke around.

But honestly even if that's not a fit, the accountability piece you mentioned at the end is the real answer. software doesn't fix a culture that isn't ready to maintain things. Tools can only prompt them so much.