Documenting Procedures for the IT Department - Suggestions & Help Needed

Subject: Documenting Procedures for the IT Department - Suggestions & Help Needed
From: "Daniel Walter" <danieljames_walter -at- hotmail -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2002 23:06:42 +0000


Hi all

At the moment I am working with some guys from a client's IT department to document their network services -- critical processes and knowledge that needs to be documented in case people leave the company and walk out with substantial local knowledge about the networks, who to contact when something goes wrong, etc.

I'm feeling a bit out of my depth and want to group the documentation they have drafted into some sort of logical structure that is sensible for them. I'd like to get some feedback from the list to see if the way I am thinking is the right way to go. I will then get their feedback -- but I want to have something sensible to show them to begin with!

The draft documentation (which is very brief -- no more than one page per topic at the moment) broadly covers where the physical devices are located, who to contact, related procedures (i.e. what to do). I've been given a list of things they have written down:

Subject & Trigger for action:
Radius server -- what to do when the routers won't authenticate
User creation and authentication -- new users, etc
Firewall -- network failure
FTP server - maintenance
Web server -- maintenance, faults, additions
Intranet -- server maintenance, failure
Domain Name Server -- maintenance faults
Email systems -- maintenance, faults
Internet Connection -- Maintenance, faults

Should I group these by function, for example, servers, and then create sub-groups such as radius server, FTP server, web server. Or would it be better to create chapters called Maintenance, Troubleshooting, Set up? This information will be able to the IT guys from their Intranet.

I'm going to look around for an online course as I need to get to grips with all of this (corporate servers, intranets, etc) as we're doing more and more of this type of work -- can anyone recommend any good resources?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
Dan



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