Programmer collaboration system

Question

Do you ever face the problem that there are a bunch of programmers in your organization that you met at the coffee machine one day, but you have no idea what the heck they're up to?

Are you ever faced with a problem you're pretty certain someone in your company has solved before, but you don't know who, and how to find out?

These are some of the challenges I'd like to address, but how? Is there any decent "programmer's collaboration software" out there that offers blogs, discussion forums, file areas for code snippets, documents, white papers, and of course a knowledge base and more? We have Sharepoint and I do not feel it qualifies.

Any idea? Recommendations? I would think someone must have solved that problem before, but how do I find out?

Related:

Online collaborative environment (not only dev oriented)
What online collaboration sites do you know?
How do you collaborate with other coders in real time?

Answer 1

How about standing up out of your cubicle and "HEY! HAS ANYONE EVER....".

To be fair, something more informal is likely better. Formal things take time. Time folks don't have. It's one of the dichotomies of development. We have time for interrupts, but not for anything else.

I would suggest relying on simply social networking. i.e. "Hey Frank, have you ever...?" "Hmm, no, but Bob might...".

Augmented by AIM or an in house IRC to help get conversations started, and then you can walk over or get on the phone to resolve the problem.

As far as knowing what others are up too, well, that's basically what the water cooler is for, and lunch times, and internal socializing, right? Unless you're the persons supervisor.

The larger the company, the larger the chance of duplication of effort. At the same time, YOUR time is basically set on YOUR project, not THEIR projects.

If you have a public SVN, then maybe you can crawl that as well.

The point being, rely on organic systems rather than something rigid, I think you'll have a better chance of success finding a happy medium.