Obsidian for RnD team - creating a collective brain!

Hi,

I’ve tested the Obsidian for a few weeks now, as my PKM system, and I realized its great potential straight away!

I work in an RnD team (high-tech, not software). I see a great need to preserve our collective knowledge. The knowledge is mostly scattered between people, drives, files, reports, etc. I think Obsidian would be great to organize all of this because it transcends the limitation of organizing things in folders. However, I have some concerns:

  1. I would like to have an administrator that would control which plugins are used and that settings are set the same way for each user. Is this something that is possible to do right now? (For example, I’m afraid that some might start changing names of notes without having the ‘update links’ option on and create a mess) Can we have a shared ‘settings file’ curated by an admin? Can we have different levels of clearance?
  2. We would like to use version tracking that I think comes with the Sync option. However, we want to keep all the files local so the Intelectual Property does not leak outside the company. Is this possible? (We would use our shared drive for the vault)
  3. Also I think that it would be great to have a workshop for the team so they don’t get overwhelmed with Obsidian. Does Obsidian Team provide such a service?
  4. Does the Obsidian Team have any case studies for setting up such a shared knowledge system? (that would be useful for pitching it to my boss :wink: )
  5. We would like to have a read-only version of the knowledge system that would allow us to share knowledge with other teams but not have them mess with our stuff. :> Is it possible (with publish I think?) Also does publish support the graph view??

If there are topics on the forum about the things I’ve asked let me know :wink: I only found this one, but it had no answers.

Best regards,
Cezary

6 Likes

Hi,
I am looking at Obsidian with the same purpose in mind. It’s interesting that no one has responded to this thread - seems like most users are individual.
I began looking into this collective brain concept with Roam Research and got concerned about the fact that the files were out of my/my company’s control so I am now testing Obsidian. Check out this mysterious link that seems like it would be exactly what we’re looking for (although in Roam):
https://roamforteamwork.com/
but the originator never took it past this page/article, sigh :frowning:

1 Like

As I understand it, Obsidian isn’t engineered for collaboration.
But the files are just files. They could sit on a company server, with access controlled. But anyone using Obsidian to access them would need a local copy, while they are doing it.

A number of people have been, and presumably are, interested in controlled access using Publish. That may come.

Some users have created alternatives to Publish, accessible via Github. Maybe they could be tweaked to suit better.

But, afaics, there’s nothing that will do this out of the box and other approaches would require a direct approach to maintenance.

1 I don’t know how much for this is possible or meaningful given that Sync is end to end encrypted and we are talking of files that ultimately are on your hard-drive. It’s something to think about. Feel free to open a new feature request about this specific point.

2 There is a plan for Sharing with with Sync https://forum.obsidian.md/t/vault-sync-sharing/16085 and There is a FR for Self hosted Sync https://forum.obsidian.md/t/self-hosted-sync-server/20975

3 & 4 .There is an official documentation and plenty of youtube tutorial and courses.

5 Yes, there is publish for that and there is also a FR for private site generator https://forum.obsidian.md/t/enterprisey-private-publishing/9340