[jhchen]

Disclosure: I am the founder of a company that aims to solve this first documentation case you pose. But the process of validating this problem and get early feedback on our solution, I interviewed to dozens of companies to learn about their tools and processes, and hopefully some of that can be helpful here.

The information split is very much as you describe between canonical and ephemeral. For the first case, the defacto tool for medium size companies (25-1000) is Confluence (large companies lean towards a custom intranet). Confluence is accessible to the entire company, not just engineers with git and markdown knowhow, it is also well established, very reasonably priced and can be deployed on cloud or on premise. There are drawbacks such poor search and complex organization that makes it hard to find anything, but there is not a clearly better solution at the moment, though there are a few startups like mine trying to change that.

For the second case, companies have tried to deploy an internal StackOverflow / Quora, some homegrown or using open source tool but unless tied to a specific workflow (like all hands Q/A), they are eventually abandoned. The issue is a lot of duplication of content that also changes very often. So long term storage is not as valuable as just removing the initial friction and what seems to work best is an ephemeral solution like a dedicated Slack/Hipchat/Teams/Mattermost/Gitter/Zulip channel.

[alxndr13]

what is the company called you founded?

[jhchen]

The company is called Slab (somewhat of a double reference to a thing you can write on and slab serif fonts). It is current in private beta but if you would like to take an early look please find my email in my profile and I would be happy to share with HN.

[billconan]

How is your solution different?

[jhchen]

We is much simpler and easy to use and plays well with the non-Atlasssian ecosystem (as well as with JIRA). In both these regards we like to think of ourselves to Confluence as Slack is to Hipchat.