Including email, IMs, configs, etc. in documentation or notes
- by Jason Antman
The shop I work in is pretty laid-back. We're on a documentation kick, only because historically we've been very bad with it. We do a lot of our brainstorming in face-to-face meetings, and also do a lot of communication via IM in addition to email.
While I'm usually pretty good about documentation and keeping copious lab notes, I just finished a build of a host and spent hours searching through IMs, emails, files on my workstation, etc. to pull out anything I missed in my lab notes, which formed a large amount of the basis for the internal documentation.
Does anyone have any thoughts on, aside from manually saving things to a project directory, managing various data sources (especially email and IM) and tracking them on project basis? Ideally, I'd like an easy way to put copies of emails, IM logs, etc. into a project-specific directory on my workstation and then just have a cron job that syncs that up with a shared folder. This isn't really a candidate for anything more advanced, as the bulk of the data will be copies of configs, code, etc.
Here are the big restrictions:
Email is via a centralized Zimbra install, so nothing can happen server-side.
My workstation is Linux.
Aside from writing Pidgin and Thunderbird plugins that let me tag chats and emails as belonging to a project, and then copy them to the appropriate place... any thoughts? Suggestions?
Thanks,
Jason
