Information Boom

I'll take another break from my upgrade aftermath tales to write about an issue I think many sysadmins face, and not only sysadmins. Handling information.

It seems that since I started this job I'm in a constant race to beat the accumulation of information, and I never seem to be on top.
When I started my training I had a notebook in which I wrote all my remarks, since at the beginning you write any minor note (although later it's trivial anyway) I soon started a second notebook. But notebooks aren't so efficient so after starting the job for real I've started to use OneNote, WOW! I can create plenty of pages in a single tab, this will definitely do the trick! But soon I needed more tabs and then more OneNote notebooks too.
To store documents my team (a team of sysadmins) uses a SharePoint portal, we used to have a folder-hierarchy structure to our documents, but at some point it just got too messy so we've decided just to throw everything in the root folder (chaos indeed) and tag it, then of course we've created views and filters for the different tags.
We also have a Wiki to store and share important knowledge.

But even with all those mechanisms set in place it seems there's just too much information to handle:
I have my daily tasks to manage. Every new topic (regardless how minor) I deal with is a page or a tab in my OneNote. A major upgrade or installation consist of my own notes (what I did, what errors I got), official installation/upgrade notes, know bugs documents, new features' documents etc.. Every problem has a related metalink note or my own document describing how to fix it. And except the EBS I'm also in charge of an OID and an iAS servers.
That's just a partial list and nothing in it can be skipped.
Both external(e.g. supplied by the vendor) and internal (written by the sysadmin) documentation is critical to every sysadmin - you can't memorize every parameter and functionality in your system and you can't expect to remember every error you handled three years ago.
But the problem starts when you need to retrieve this information, if you don't organize your information wisely it doesn't matter that you have a perfect documentation of how to fix a bug because you just won't be able to find it, too bad. I can think of many times when I was sure I saw something familiar before and had to start guessing where exactly - my OneNote? The portal? Maybe in my documents' folder before I started using the portal? Maybe I eventually didn't download it from the metalink? Or maybe someone else showed it to me? Trust me, this can get pretty frustrating.
Having a good logic for storing your information is crucial but from my experience it's just not enough as information tends to outgrow any such solution.
As I see it, the only real solution is a powerful searching solution that has access to all the storage solutions you use.

I'm actually going to explore this field of enterprise search solutions so I might have more insight in following posts.