FW: Managing the multitudes

[KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com]

**Second try to get this request out to the list**

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin McLauchlan 
Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2001 4:05 PM
To: TECHWR-L; Kevin McLauchlan; 'kevinmcl -at- netrover -dot- com'
Subject: Managing the multitudes


G'day all.

I've been a lone writer in a growing company. 
Soon, the "lone" part may change.

Information comes to me in many ways, though the 
most frequent path is e-mail. I am a member of 
several engineering e-mail groups within the 
company, plus the Product Verification Group, the 
Customer Support group, and a few others, and I 
also get the automated e-mail updates from our 
developers' issue-tracking system (a system that 
has incredibly poor search and classification 
capability, by the way...). 

So, I've been organizing this info in e-mail 
folders and in Windoze file heirarchies, along 
with notes to myself and... well, it's getting 
a little overwhelming and would be impossible 
to efficiently share with a newcomer.

Reams of info, received over months, need to 
find their way into any of several documents in 
several possible sets. The trick -- which I'm 
managing less well as it grows -- is not so 
much to store it all, as to flag it for appropriate 
retrieval.  One item might need to go in only one 
doc. Another might want to go into five different 
docs that will be produced at different times 
over the next four months.

I've decided that I need a database or some other 
methodology that two or more people could comfortably 
use to funnel, categorize, search and retrieve thousands 
of chunkettes of info. Some are a sentence or two. 
Others are many pages long. Still others might be 
references into tables or page-ranges of engineering 
or marketing documents.

I don't need -- and couldn't justify -- something 
big and "corporate".  

What tool(s) and working methods do you folks use 
in small shops (that might continue to grow, we hope)??

Would SGML be of some help, here? I have nothing in 
place, but...  ?  I've seen discussions of SGML 
databases for organization and re-use of material, 
but the discussion seems to lean toward info that is 
created by those who feed the database -- and therefore 
has the relevant attributes.  What do you do with snippets 
and e-mail discussions and tech-support interactions and 
development bug-reports and fix descriptions and... ?

I know what I do, but it's beginning to stagger and stumble.

I've been thinking of starting up a Microsloth SQL server 
(only because we have in-house for other people's uses).  
Any thoughts on that? Pro? Con?  
What would/do you use for a client app? Something 
off-the-shelf? Roll your own with Visual Basic or 
Visual C++? Cobble something webbish?

It's important that, whatever the solution is, it 
not take too much time and effort to set up, but 
it's even more important that it be fast and painless 
to use -- both for stuffing new data and for getting it 
back when it's needed.

Suggestions? 

Does somebody have a nice application for which they 
give training in some sunny locale?  :-)

We're webless for another day or two (IS is fixing or 
breaking something again, in the firewall trenches), 
so pursuit of URLs will need to wait until I get home, 
tonight.

I'll summarize promising responses.

Thank you.

/kevin


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