What is your experience with knowledge management in team environment?

Knowledge management
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I’m fairly new to Obsidian and have started to build something that looks like a PKM system for myself. But as doing so I figured that I could build a vault for my team of software test engineers at work.

We do struggle with knowledge management. We have a lot of knowledge in the team, but only certain people are experts in their area. We also have a lot of routines, notes, information in files on shared drives and as files inside different tools. This makes it very hard to find that specific piece of information, even if we know it exists somewhere. I believe that Obsidian could solve this problem, by unifying information in a shared vault.

Another issue we have as a global team is sharing information at the end of our workday with the co-workers starting their day. We are now writing a daily blog in an endless word document, which is cumbersome to work with. I can see that the daily notes in Obsidian, combined with a simple template, could solve that issue.

I’m now looking to the more experienced Obsidian users, to see if you have any experience in using Obsidian in a more team-centric environment? Is there any advice to give?

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This is really brief, but I don’t think Obsidian would work all that well for teamwork because of how raw it tends to be. Raw notes work fine for a PKM because you know how you introduced notes. However, with a team, I think the group would get caught up in everyone’s fleeting thoughts and be more confused.

I think that teams need some sort of formalizing and organizing. Notion is program that may be a good choice for you.

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Here is an interesting workflow from a team of pentesters. Their use case is the same as yours. Thanks to @EleanorKonik for highlighting this in her newsletter.

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There’s this explanation about note titles from the article:

Note that the title of the Note is seen here in Edit mode and is itself, a link. Maintaining a page title as a link allows us to seamlessly update the title and all references to the title over the entire vault if its ever necessary.

I do this, and it’s easily one of the best/easiest ways to work with titles. I can’t remember where I picked up that trick, but definitely recommend trying it if you haven’t.

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My team (software engineering) uses a shared Obsidian vault to capture project notes. Things like feature decisions might get captured there, along with alternatives that were considered.

We have seen the following benefits:

  • It’s a good environment to capture notes during a meeting, usually with one person typing while everyone looks on Zoom / in their own copy of the vault.
  • We reference it increasingly often, as we trust the information captured there more.
  • It’s pretty easy to get to the vault, and carries less overhead than full-fledged wiki software.

What hasn’t been great:

  • Syncing is… eh. Usually it works fine, and we’re probably lucky it works as well as it does (using OneDrive).
  • Obsidian isn’t really built for this, so multiple people working on the same note is just begging for collisions and oddness.

In short: it’s working very well for us and I’d love to see us use it more, but there are some workflow issues to be worked out.

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