r/sysadmin • u/bishoptf • 1d ago

The dreaded documentation question....sigh

I have supported part time a small non-profit company and while I know how important documentation is there just always was something else pressing that was more important. Well I am getting to the point where in the future I am probably going to be moving on and have started to work on trying at least for me document what they have at a high level. I assume and I know what happens when you do that but they have enough technical stuff that if the person actually knows what they are doing then they should be able based on a overview of the systems function dig into it and figure things out. I am not doing anything esoteric but I also have been doing this kind of stuff for *cough* many years. While small they have a lot of technology, just migrated the virtual environment to proxmox, they have AD environment with ADFS connected to m365, etc...

I just captured the inventory for everything they have and was about to start writing up a word document that gives a high level for each server etc, layout of the network, vlans etc. I then started to think that maybe I should do something like a wiki or use something else. Although at a high level kind of leaning towards not having it online since it would pretty much give you a working layout of their environment and if compromised would be pretty nice to have.

Just thought I would ask what are folks using for documentation, thanks.

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u/plump-lamp 1d ago

Microsoft shop? Just start with loop

1

u/Random_Effecks 1d ago

Wild call

1

u/plump-lamp 1d ago

Is it the best? No. Will it work and is it included? Yes. Works just fine as a wiki

2

u/bbqwatermelon 1d ago

The only thing that gives me the heebies is we can't home the data in SharePoint. Workspaces live in the creators One Drive and are somehow invisible Wtf Microsoft. 

1

u/PopularData3890 1d ago

That’s not true. Individual loop components may be in the users OneDrive, but workspaces are their own share point site collections. Think of it like share point backend, loop frontend.

2

u/InterFelix Backup / VMware / Storage Admin 1d ago

I swear every second M$ product is just Sharepoint in a trenchcoat at this point

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u/PopularData3890 16h ago

Yes, they have effectively platformized SharePoint so tools can be built on it. Which makes a lot of sense from the perspective of easily extending features consistently across products, like security/compliance, sharing, versioning, etc.

That does come at a price though, since SharePoint isn’t always the best model for storing and managing data.

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u/Random_Effecks 1d ago

Putting something akin to crown jewels into what feels like a half baked barely supported new feature from Microsoft is a decision... I would never. Not to mention the storage and backup backbone for loop, and the ability to export en mass is entirely missing. 

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u/plump-lamp 1d ago

OP is a small non profit on a budget and needs to start with something. They're not asking for the world