Software/Platform to Share Specs

Question

What are the software/ Wiki you use to write and share your specs about the developers, testers and management?

Do you use Wiki system, and if so, what Wiki software you use?

Or do you use Sharepoint to manage and version the specs? One problem with SharePoint 2003 as specs platform is that it's very hard to collaborate among different people.

For backward compatibility sake, I would also like to have the platform able to import Microsoft Word seamlessly. And it would certainly help if the interface is similar to Microsoft Word.

Any idea?

Answer 1

We use SharePoint -- it's not ideal, but it does a decent job. If I were you, I would seriously look at getting off SharePoint 2003 and on to MOSS (SharePoint 2007). It's not perfect, but it's substantially better. Here's a little bit on using MOSS as a wiki. I think in general wiki's are a good tool for getting people up to speed on your system. We used to pass around "getting started documents" and now we have all that type of stuff in our developer portal.

Per John's comment, I looked up this feature comparison. I have to go back and look at what features I'm using that are not in WSS -- I might be paying for licenses I don't need! :)

Answer 2

I've used Confluence at a number of places, it's a pretty powerful wiki and very good for creating specifications that can be shared amongst various parties. See:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/

There's some more information here on the advantages of using Confluence:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/170352/confluence-experiences

EDIT: I've updated this to deal with the Microsoft Word import feature you mentioned. Confluence supports this through the Office Connector here:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/office-connector.jsp

There's also a Sharepoint connector:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/sharepoint-connector.jsp

plus a whole bunch of plugins:

http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/sharepoint-connector.jsp

Some of these are user contributed also. I can't recommend Confluence enough as a commercial wiki.

I've also used JSPWiki, which is open source. it's ok but not as good as confluence, see:

http://www.jspwiki.org/

Answer 3

We use email. I know it isn't elaborate, but it is easy to use. Everyone has it installed and there are no licensing issues. All spec changes are sent to an super set email distro indicating the updates and the location on the network share where the spec can be found.

Answer 4

We use Alfresco, in its Community version, from both its Share and Explorer web interfaces. Quite useful, with a document library, wiki, forum and calendar. We curently host about 1.8 Go consisting mainly in docs, versionned and sometimes automatically converted to PDF (by creating an automatic content rule). FTP, WebDav and network share are also used to access to the same repository.

Answer 5

You could take a look at Microsoft Groove - the collaboration software that Microsoft bought a few years back.

It's bundled free with premium versions of Microsoft Office.

You can customize the workspace with discussion boards and can fairly seamlessly store collaboratively-edited Office documents.

Answer 6

We use MediaWiki for dos & specs. Wiki definitely wins anything like Microsoft Word or SharePoint - it allows you to develop a documentation in "first refer, then describe" = "divide and rule" way. Perfect for developers - they used to think the same way. The process of developing a documentation is almost ideal: you start from TOC and drill down until you write the document for every link you put earlier.

MediaWiki is quite customizable - there are lots of extensions there. The most necessary ones are:

• Source code highlighter - CSO_Source
• Our own templates integrating wiki with class reference.
• Others are InterWiki, FileProtocolLinks, YouTube (we use customized version of it to display HD video), ReCaptcha, SpecialDeleteOldRevisions, Maintenance.

Some integration examples are here.

And we use Google issue tracker to track the issues. Its main advantages:

• Imput usability: the process of adding\changing the issue is really convenient there. Earlier we tried Track Studio - the same actions require 2-3 times more time there, so it died fast simply because most of us hated to use it.
• Customizable grids. See the examples. Really helpful.
• Atom\RSS support. So everyone knows what's going on.
• There is a Gurtle tool integrating it with TortoiseSVN. Really helpful.

Its main disadvantage is that it can't be closed from the public access. This makes it simply unusable in many cases.

Answer 7

You could try Google docs - I have successfully used this in the past. It supports import / export to MS Word, and it has great support for multiple user - see http://www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/8236.aspx.
It supports versioning, allows you to chat with other people who are currently working on the document, and shows you a list of all the changes others have made to the document (without needing to close / reopen the document).

If you want corporate support, Google also provides that - see Google Apps for business.

Answer 8

If you want a UI similar to Word, why not use Word with SharePoint 2007? You're on 2003 so the experience is there. Upgrade to SharePoint 2007 and you can have the collaboration, Word features, document sharing, and so on.

This is the kind of thing Microsoft wants people to use Office for, so there's a ton of doco out there about how to configure your SharePoint and Office environment to support collaboration.

Answer 9

There is something that Google do in this direction and it looks really cool: wave.google.com. It would be a great step in collaboration and worth to wait it.

Answer 10

Here we use Google Docs it makes the documents available to everyone write or read only, public or private among people that have or not Google accounts, it also can import Word docs, not to mention that it runs directly into the browser so it has high availability with zero cost and zero setup, also its computer/OS agnostic, we have a nice experience with it.

Also perhaps you should take a look at Basecamp or Backpack at 37Signals, any of then might also fit your bill.

Answer 11

We use DocBook for all of our specifications (and other customer-facing documentation). DocBook is an XML format that lets you easily generate documents in just about any format, including PDF, which is how we distribute things to clients to get them signed off. We can divide a document into files (by section) and commit everything to our source control system (Subversion). Because it is all XML (i.e. text-based), Subversion's automatic merging and conflict resolution works great if two people work on the same file. We have a set of stylesheets that all of our documents use, so all documents share the exact same style/format, with no extra work on our part.

And if you don't like editing XML files directly, there are GUI front-ends that provide a reasonably WYSIWYG-like experience. I believe that most people in my office use XMLMind. Still, we happen to all be technical people so if we had to write XML directly it wouldn't be an issue.

As a sidenote, we also put out release notes. We have some XSLT that lets us write documents like this:

<bugs>
    <bug id="1234" component="web">JavaScript error when clicking the Kick Me button</bug>
</bugs>

We then have a script that runs through our Subversion repository doing an svn log from the previous release tag to the current release tag, and some Bugzilla integration to automatically generate release notes on-the-fly.

(also, for most internal-only documentation, we use MediaWiki, which is also a great way to collaborate.)

Answer 12

We use OnTime. It was originally only used for defect tracking, but we've started using it to track features as well. These can be used to document the feature as it evolves during development. Features can be grouped together into sprints or releases, and time can be tracked against each feature. If you are using SCRUM, you can also plot burn-down charts for each sprint. It also has wiki functionality.