Building Your Own Knowledge Base? 14
Flobster asks: "I just joined a company that has left the state of start-up and now wants to deliver professional end user support by the web as well as means to share product information internally. I know programming and databases and I have this fantastic MS Knowledge Base in the back of my mind - but just how did they organise that? All we have until now is plenty of word and visio based docs and release notes along with different FAQs, but the info the help desk is giving to customers is more or less never tracked or gathered somewhere. So where could i get a system or help to build a system that organises these texts, diagramms and future information so that i could search for them on a website?
Anything from complete source code to books i should read would help!"
Several companies doing this... (Score:1)
Re:KB (Score:1)
Color me curious, but if you're short on time why rewrite the app in perl? For readability? :)
Because after coding in PHP for a while I have discovered that
Good going for getting all that working. The only thing i'm not sure about is the inability to edit entries? if i have that correct.
Yes that's correct; if you need to make a correction that is one thing (spelling, /usr/local/bin instead of /usr/bin, etc.) but the idea of not allowing edits is to build up a base of "what not to do."
It'll come along. I would like to have the system automatically determine if an edit should be a new article or simply a revision. Something along the lines of a character-granularity diff; if more than x characters in a row over y lines have changed, it's a new entry, otherwise it's just an edit.
I will have to check out amaya though; I had not heard of it (or rather I had but didn't take a look).
KB (Score:2)
I've created my own KB already: http://www.mixdown.org/kb [mixdown.org]. This was done quite a while ago in PHP as a learning lesson and I've been itching for quite some time to finish it up. Three kids, a full time job and a couple of contract jobs make time scarce though. :-)
What the vision is:
I've got the text entry and bits and pieces of the keywording and rating working. I'll be redoing it in Perl and finishing it up When I Get Time<tm> -- the current source is available to anyone if they want. As you can see if you go and look, I use it as a place to store things I have learned the hard way or found interesting and know I won't be able to find again.
This isn't directly related to business KBs but I figure this type of system would work most excellently in a customer-service and engineering environment.
Have a look at TWiki (Score:2)
Its used sucessfully by quite a few large corporates for their knowledge bases and support tools. See TWikiSuccessStories [twiki.org] for some specifics.
TWiki is based on the WikiWiki concept, but adds version management (including of file attachment), access control, plugins and change notification. It has an active development communtity at TWiki.Codev [twiki.org].
Indiana University (Score:3)
Another method of doing this is to use the FAQ-O-MATIC [sourceforge.net], written primarily by Jon Howell I believe. Jon's approach differs because the FOM is meant to be user driven. It can easily be closed up for in-house maintenance only but it's original intent was to be a user-driven and user-support tool to aide other users. I've used it and have been impressed with it as well. It gets better and better with each new release.
Any knowledge base type of tool will have one very important thing in common. They require time, and possibly lots of it. They require time to build, time to administer, time to update, and time to maintain. It's not always an easy task. If you can delegate some of the responsibility for bits and pieces of it down to others better suited to those bits and pieces, all the better. Making sure they keep up on their end of the deal though will need some superior oversight. Indiana Unv says they spend 300 hours a week on their KB. While it may not be exactly that much time and of that time they may not be working hard on the KB, they do spend a lot of time on it (I imagine they took their total number of student consultant * a percentage of their weekly working hours to get 300 hours--it's still a lot of hours). I never built K-State a knowledge base. I started more than once but I always ended up running out of time. If this is something they want you to do, make sure they know that it can use up a lot of your time, especially in the beginning. Make sure they acknowledge this and don't expect you to do this job and another fulltime job on top of it. Good luck!
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Web Based Knowledge Base (Score:2)
Use Zope... (Score:2)
www.zope.org [zope.org]
Re:KB (Score:1)
Paint me stupid, but where?
IBM (Score:2)
EIP (Enterprise Information Portal) is a definite possibility if you need to search over multiple content stores.
Downside: price...
Simplifying support (Score:1)
I don't have better advice about KB than the other replies here, but this site is worth taking a look- http://www.viewlet.com . We are going to use their professional edition to create very user-friendly help files for our software and deliver it over the web straight to the end user.
It cuts out some of the direct helpdesk interaction, which is more cost effective. Plus, endusers can be difficult sometimes, and the viewlet lets you "hold their hand" and show them the exact mouse moves and clicks they need to do!
Hire someone (Score:1)
I know if someone back in high school offered me a job like this, I would take it. Beside it looks good on a resume, Mantained Knowlage Base for XYZ Corp.
All Your Knowledge Base Are belong to Us! (Score:1)
Re:KB (Score:1)
Good going for getting all that working. The only thing i'm not sure about is the inability to edit entries? if i have that correct.
I'm pretty happy using Amaya for my personal database--I just maintain an html page of subjects, and click to read/edit a subject page: Amaya is a combo editor/browser, with easy, simultaneous access to the html source. Available from www.w3.org/amaya.
To jot quick notes, i have a "mergeme" subject to save me the time of opening the correct subject page. i periodically batch insert its contents into the correct subject pages after sorting it with a simple perl script.
To index the pages for searching, i use ht://Dig, which gives me the relevant filenames. But i need to do more work with her. The ht://Dig people may have improved her lately, i have to check, but, eg, their docs are flaky in places, a main developer is a testy, and support can be hard to get. But hey, it's a free product.
Here is one solution... (Score:3)
http://www.microsoft.com/business/km/default.as
Is a place to start.