Helpful Talk

For those of you who work in the professional IT arena, you may run into a project that requires developing a Knowledge Base system. I compiled this document to include all the features found in commercial solutions marketed as Knowledge Bases and am donating it here to be published on Useful Talk dot com.

It is worth mentioning that in many instances Knowledge Base solutions are also marketed as: Help Desk, Customer Support, Company Intranet, Employee Training, Document Management, CMS, and Team Collaboration tools.

This document is by no means the guide to Knowledge Bases, it is what I believe to be an accurate representation of a KB system. Feel free to reuse this document but you must always give credit to me and link back to Useful Talk or to this article.

The main features of a Knowledge Base system are:

Accessibility:

• Self-service web tool that allows collaboration.
• Document storage you can access anywhere, i.e. web access.

Public Access / Self Service to provide:

• Contact us
• Search
• Browsing Knowledge articles (tree/folder/category navigation)
• FAQ
• Solution Finder – wizard (decision/question and answer based navigation.
• Glossary
• Send email
• Forum
• Chat
• Voip

Collaboration:

• Share content and collaborate on documents (Team work)
• Forums – Conduct and post discussion topics
• Calendar – Schedule, post and share events
• Assign tasks

Content and Content Features:

• Nodes (a node is a page, article, comment, etc..)
• Pages (static)
• Articles
• Comments
• Create a page and attach a file (documents, images, multimedia, flash)
• Create a page from an existing MS Office document – converted imported document to html
• Notify users of new contents
• Multiple data sources and formats to offer solutions (i.e. youtube)
• Voting / rating system for users to rate articles
• WYSIWYG (Word-like) editor making it easy to create tables and hyperlinks etc

Content Quality:

• Document routing and management for approval before becomming publicly available.
• Document review available
• Article expiration.
• Versioning. Version control automatic.
• Archiving.
• Work Flow System:

· Multiple people to approve a document, changes, or any new docs.

· Predefined workflows or use an ‘on the fly’ option.

· Auto email notifications to persons or groups when tasks complete or rejected.

· Workflow queue.

Taxonomy:

• Create categories that make it easier for your customers to browse for answers. Configure categories to highlight featured and popular articles of particular interest to your customers.
• Create folders to organize content

Notification:

• e-mail notification
• e-mail notification on actions (new, delete, update, workflow)
• Subscriptions – subscribe to articles or categories to get notified when changes occur. Also utilize a notification schedule.
• Share article/document with a friend, via email invitation.

Access Control / Security:

• Allow unauthenticated access to public pages
• Add editors, notify members for each doc to be informed or allowed to edit
• Create rooms / departments / role based classification - Each department can manage their own information.
• More granular control of access per content/document/page.
• Use rooms as secure areas – user rights control per room
• Active Directory/LDAP Integration. If AD is not used built in user management is available

Search:

• Tasks to assign tasks to team members
• Quick Search
• Advanced Search:
  • Search title, text, refine by category
  • Search Attachment text (MS office doc and PDF)
  • Thesaurus engine includes or suggests relevant words.
• Ordered by search relevancy
• Can place documents on a network share, have the KB index these document and become searchable through the KB.

Reporting tools:

• Visitors
• Article hit report
• Search keyword report
• Feedback
• User summary
• User details
• Workflow
• Vote results - Voting system for users to rate articles

Architecture:

• MS SQL server ASP .NET
• Hosted or not
• No dedicated hardware needed
• Completely web based

Internationalization

• Other languages.

Display:

• Hot topics
• Top 10 frequently asked questions
• Tree / folder navigation
• Printer friendly pages/articles.
• WYSIWYG editor

Help Desk Integration:

Most Knowledge Bases are best when integrated with your Help Desk system, Support analysts can use one system to search Knowledge and resolve incoming calls and tickets. Features of a Knowledge Base integrated with a ticketing system:

• Easy search.
• Leaves a record in each ticket of what KB documents were searched/used.
• Integrates with help desk reporting.
• Manage incidents/tickets
• Escalate re-occurring incidents/tickets into Problems that can be managed by a project manager.

Ethan CMS & Wikis CMS, Knowledge Base