I am building a small business with 5 employees currently. We rely on quite a bit of tech but are not a tech thing (med industry). We use Google Workspace as our internal center piece.
We have also decided to pass on Notion to stay in the suite and not complicate things for a semi-technical staff – but I can definitely feel that the lack of a solid wiki substitute in GW is an issue and does complicate things.
It's easy enough to just open a blank page in either Google Docs or Notion and start typing. The power of Notion is in the incredibly low amount of effort you have to pour into knowledge upkeep. Tying it all together. Cleaning it up. Keeping it accessible and inviting to explore and expand.
Not being able to adhoc create and link documents, not having easy templates and powerful inline tables, working with images without having to manually resize them to make sense and people starting to fuck with colours and fonts (just to name a few things) is really cumbersome and makes the task of maintenance really heavy.
Google Sites exists. It just isn't good enough (reasons outside the scope of this post). For Docs or GW in general hope is on the horizon with smart canvas, web view for Docs and more coming.
Lastly, money of this magnitude is really, really not a concern at our little shop. We generate income. Employees costs thousands of $ per month. Keeping people motivated, using the tools and making both collection, access and maintenance of knowledge simple is.
If I could pay another $10/month/user for a Google Notion I would.
Interesting. Having used various tools, I'm leaning the other way back towards Google docs for simplicity and search. The key is that search works really well along with collaboration. Linking docs in gdocs has also improved.
Yup Google doesn’t have a good alternative for a wiki and they are invaluable in companies. Notion is the best wiki I’ve seen, not trying it because it isn’t Google is bad advice
The reason we decided against it, is that tech fatigue is a super real thing and it gets sobering fest when you deal with non-technical folks who actually just want to get a completely unrelated job done.
They are just not enthusiastic about new organisational tools. They just want something simple and familiar.
We had a Notion test run. It would have taken additional energy to convince people to get accustomed and actually use it, more than we were willing to expend on this matter at the time.
Each new tool adds a burden. While the exact opposite is true for a lot of tech folks (to an unhealthy degree), just the idea of "yet another tool" is draining to a lot of normies and something I have come to strongly consider.
I am building a small business with 5 employees currently. We rely on quite a bit of tech but are not a tech thing (med industry). We use Google Workspace as our internal center piece.
We have also decided to pass on Notion to stay in the suite and not complicate things for a semi-technical staff – but I can definitely feel that the lack of a solid wiki substitute in GW is an issue and does complicate things.
It's easy enough to just open a blank page in either Google Docs or Notion and start typing. The power of Notion is in the incredibly low amount of effort you have to pour into knowledge upkeep. Tying it all together. Cleaning it up. Keeping it accessible and inviting to explore and expand.
Not being able to adhoc create and link documents, not having easy templates and powerful inline tables, working with images without having to manually resize them to make sense and people starting to fuck with colours and fonts (just to name a few things) is really cumbersome and makes the task of maintenance really heavy.
Google Sites exists. It just isn't good enough (reasons outside the scope of this post). For Docs or GW in general hope is on the horizon with smart canvas, web view for Docs and more coming.
Lastly, money of this magnitude is really, really not a concern at our little shop. We generate income. Employees costs thousands of $ per month. Keeping people motivated, using the tools and making both collection, access and maintenance of knowledge simple is.
If I could pay another $10/month/user for a Google Notion I would.