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Advice for building documentation for a small company? (self.sysadmin)

submitted 2 years ago by kurosawaa to c/[email protected]

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Hi guys, I recently started working at a company with about 50 people that has grown to large for their current IT setup. They have no documentation or any SOPs. Has anyone been in a similar situation and how did you go about creating documentation, especially when you are new and don't fully understand all of the services they have in place?

Thankfully it's mostly a Microsoft shop and pretty low tech but there are dozens of exchange rules in place that no one knows why they exist or what they do, dozens of SharePoint sites with critical information strewn about them and so on. It's hard to think where to even start and decide what the best way to organize this information will be, and keep in a place a system where we will update it regularly. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

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[–] badcommandorfilename 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

One thing that worked for me in a similar situation was to enforce an "owner" tag or some kind of registry on everything.

Basically, if you set something up, change some configuration, whatever - put your email address on it.

Write a readme.md or wiki or guide too, but at the very minimum put your name down as the owner so that when someone comes along and wants to know if it's safe to change/upgrade/delete, they can find you and ask. If someone leaves, you can do a quick search and get them to handover/write up anything they were responsible for.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This will be important as the company gets larger - don't put your personal (or anyone's) email address on it. Put a department DL or Teams Group email on it, unless you alone want to be the only supporter and owner of whatever it is until you leave the company.

[–] kurosawaa 1 points 2 years ago

This is already a huge problem for me. A lot of accounts have the names of former IT admins that left 5 years ago and no one has bothered to update contact info with some of our suppliers. We are getting better at it now but I'm still finding more accounts that no one seems to know we have.