You need consistent, immediate access to information throughout every stage of the product development lifecycle — and the cross-functional teams you work with need access to the same information you do. With an internal wiki, you can collaboratively create, share, and manage information in a central location. This makes it easy for everyone to access the knowledge they need, when they need it.
In this article, we will build an example internal wiki that cross-functional teams at our organization can use to share knowledge. Follow along to set up your own wiki that you can share with the team.
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Add workspace documents |
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Edit workspace documents |
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Share workspace documents |
Identify the need
Let's say we work at a fictitious SaaS company called Fredwin Technologies. Our product, engineering, and customer success teams create and share a lot of documentation cross-functionally. The product portfolio is growing quickly, so everyone needs a central place to access all these resources. But with documents stored in disparate tools — including Google Docs, Confluence, and Aha! Roadmaps — it is difficult for team members to find the information they are looking for. And we need all teams to be able to view, edit, and comment on our documentation so we can keep it updated with the most current information.
We will build a product wiki in Aha! Knowledge so we can share all our documents in a central place and address this issue. This way, internal teams can easily access and contribute to a shared repository of information.
Structure your wiki
Because we want our wiki to be in a centralized place, we will create it in the workspace our product team uses: Fredwin Cycling. Within our workspace, we can build out folders and a document hierarchy to organize the information we will store here. Types of documents we typically share include customer research, training materials, meeting notes, wireframes, and technical information.
We will create folders for each type of document we store, adding subfolders as necessary. For example, we will create separate folders for meeting notes and wireframes. Our meeting notes folder will contain additional subfolders for each month of the year to keep everything organized. And our wireframes folder will contain additional subfolders for each product.
If you are following along:
From within your workspace, click Add and select Folder.
Add a title to each folder.
Add documents
Pull in documents from other workspaces
Our product team has product requirements documents (PRDs) in a separate workspace that our engineering team needs access to. Because those teammates need to view PRDs and contribute to our wiki regularly, we will move that folder out of our product team workspace and into the new workspace we created for our wiki. We will also store new PRDs here moving forward.
If you are following along:
Navigate to the folder you want to move and click its More options menu.
Click Move folder.
On the next screen, choose the workspace you created for your wiki and click Move to workspace.
If you do not want to move a document out of a workspace but still want to include it in your product wiki, add a link to it within your documents list:
Click Add and select Link.
Click Aha! link.
Use the dropdown to search for the document you want to add. Once you select the document, click Add link.
Once you add a link, you can drag and drop it to its desired place within your document hierarchy.
Import documents from Confluence
Our engineering team also has documentation stored in Confluence that our product team needs access to. We will import those documents into our workspace so the broader group can access and edit them.
If you are following along:
Navigate to Settings ⚙️ -> Workspace -> Import from Confluence.
On the next screen, select how your Confluence site is hosted, enter your Confluence credentials, and choose the Confluence space to import.
Click Import.
Back in your workspace, you will find the documents in a folder titled with the name of the Confluence space you imported. Drag and drop them into the appropriate folders in your workspace.
Create new documents from one of our 100+ purpose-built templates that make up the Aha! template library. Each note and whiteboard template was designed by a product expert, and you will find templates that support every stage of the product development lifecycle.
Invite collaborators
Now that we have built out our wiki, we want collaborators to be able to access it. So we will add users to our workspace. We have already created these user accounts within Aha! Knowledge in order to add them:
Navigate to Settings ⚙️ -> Workspace -> Users.
Select Existing user.
Click Add user. On the next screen, use the dropdown to select the users you want to add to your workspace.
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Select a Role:
A Contributor can edit existing documents and add new documents to your workspace.
A Reviewer can view documents in your workspace. You get to decide on a per-document basis whether reviewers can edit documents.
Click Invite users.
That is it! We have built an internal wiki that our whole team can access and contribute to. Our team will use the Aha! template library for many of our documents, but we might build out custom templates to standardize documentation across our wiki.
With all of our documentation in our workspace, there are several ways we can use Aha! Knowledge to support our documentation workflow:
Add a to-do to a document and assign it to a co-worker for a review or copyedit request.
Use inline comments to point out important details, ask questions, and clarify details.
Add tags to categorize documents without needing to move or reorganize them. Then, search for the tag to find all the documents it has been added to.
Click on a document and use the History icon in the text editor toolbar to see a document's full version history (and revert to an earlier version when necessary).
If you get stuck, please reach out to our Customer Success team. Our team is made up entirely of product experts and responds fast.