A jack of all trades platform is a type of supposed general-purpose documentation platform whose primary purpose is not documentation per se. Their focus is usually project management, service management, enterprise collaboration, or similar. In all cases, such platforms present themselves as a ‘one stop shop’, suggesting, in the eyes of the buyer, that a discrete documentation solution is not necessary.
Some jack of all trades platforms include:
| Name | Native Document Format | DocOps Automation |
|---|---|---|
| Asana | HTML (Using a specific subset) | REST API |
| ClickUp | The storage format is proprietary but the REST API accepts either a Markdown or plain text with several encoding limitations. | REST API |
| Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Word when embedding such documents on tabs. There use to be a Wiki capability but it was deprecated in 2023 in favor of OneNote documents, in which case the storage format is HTML. | GraphQL API in general and REST API for OneNote documents. |
| Monday | Proprietary JSON-based block demarcation format. | GraphQL API and Node.js SDK. |
Pros and Cons
In nearly all cases, given that documentation is an ancillary concern, jack of all trades platforms suffer from poor alignment to DocOps principles, saving for the principle of shared responsibility.
© 2022-2024 Ernesto Garbarino | Contact me at ernesto@garba.org