Intuitive Wiki / Knowledge Base

Question

I am looking for recommendations for a suitable wiki/knowledge base/platform to produce documentation on a variety of business intelligence projects such as:

• Database documentation – documentation on all database objects, technical documentation internally for team.
• ETL documentation – detailed documentation on ETL processes, schedules etc. internally for the team.
• Procedural documentation – step by step notes on production of reports, data extracts and internal processes.
• Report documentation – supporting documentation to existing reports, less technical for a wider audience outside of team to consume but not contribute. At present none of this exists and the majority is in my head and whilst I am more than comfortable using any particularly piece of software other members in the team are not so ease of use is critical. These are the things which I believe to be essential:
• Intuitive GUI – easy to get the basics right with very little training, does not require any HTML/Javascript/CSS knowledge to produce a document
• WYISWYG editor based on some form of markdown to produce clean and consistent documents – no rich text editors for users to create their own styles
• Code blocks/syntax highlighting
• Templating – able to create page/document templates that require fields to be input and prompt the user on what to include depending on the type of thing they are documenting.
• Integration with existing Active Directory
• Simple workflow management for marking pages as out of date/requiring updates
• Easy to embed and edit screenshots/images into pages
• Method of grouping and structuring content either through tags, macros to provide navigation

Desirable:

• Version control of documents
• Granular permissions
• Workflow management for content approval
• Export documents into PDF/Word

We currently have SharePoint Online in our organisation and I am expecting to consider that but I personally feel that this does not meet the essential criteria out of the box.

Confluence looks ideal though I am interested to hear of other alternatives to compare it with, perhaps XWiki.

Answer 1

I think a platform called https://bip.so fits most of your requirements and desirable features.

It has all the basic documentation features that any tool requires, apart from that they have the collaboration feature that you require. Our moderated git-workflow makes it so that your team members have to put up a merge request whenever they edit a document and the moderator, the person in charge of the document, can review it and approve it for them to appear on the original document.

Here are some other features that you need that bip has.

Easy embed of Images - ✔ Content Grouping - ✔ Granular Permissions - ✔ Code Blocks - ✔ Easy GUI- ✔

You might want to check it out.

Answer 2

We are now working on a new project called Aistant. It's supposed to be an AI-powered bot/ticketing service for customer support teams. The first part of it is actually a knowledge base service. It's in the early BETA stage now but the basic functionality is there and works well.

Here is an example of documentation hosted there.

Since it's a startup - we are open to any suggestions/recommendations/feature requests from the early adopters :)