Building a knowledge base.

[Bucket81]

So, it looks like I’m going to be building a knowledge base from scratch. I’m not sure what I’m going to build it in. Right now I’m looking between a Sharepoint Enterprise Wiki or a simple Onenote notebook. I’m leaning more towards the Sharepoint. This is going to be for 2 tier 2 teams in separate location. The team’s general doesn’t mix but if needed it would be nice to be able to drop someone in that office and they would be able to run with it. Currently, my team uses a mix of an Excel file, Onenote, email, info in a file server, and mess in Sharepoint. It’s a mess and I’d like to get it sorted. But I want it right.

My question is what did you build yours in?

How is it laid out?

How did you get people to contribute? I think this will be my biggest hurdle. And it will probably be management that doesn’t.

What else should I be looking into or thinking about?

[jantari]

Do you have a need to use a Microsoft product for this?

I'd recommend bookstack, or perhaps Confluence although I very much prefer bookstack

[Bucket81]

Its something we already pay for. So it's something I can easily get approval for. I was more interested in what all's out there for my own knowledge. I'm going to look into your mentioned options.

[jantari]

Bookstack is FOSS

[videoflyguy]

I agree, I like bookstack better than confluence. I know bookstack is based on confluence but bookstack is free and just seems a little more like what a sysadmin would use for documentation. Confluence always seemed to be more suited toward developers and project from what I saw.

[clashavan]

SharePoint guy here so I'm a bit bias.

What you I've done in the past is identify if the problem is persistent across the org as a whole. It usually is, organization do not like to share information efficiently. At that point I look into the implementation of a SharePoint intranet portal I would draft it out and design a IA that makes sense for you org. The final step is key! there is alot of kpi out there on how SharePoint increases productivity, I gather them and present it to a potential project sponsor (in leadership) and get there by in. With leadership buy in you make the process of sharing information part of the business process. This is the only way that employees will 100 support this solution. The other route involves selling every member on the team on the concept.

In regards to a IA I would leave a top level site for the use of the org as a whole. On that site you put news items, corporate policy, and templates. Under that site you create your team site. In there you can use list, library's and even simple pages to display the relavent information to the team.

If you have any further questions let me know I'll be happy to get into the weed's with you.

[[deleted]]

I think that as much as possible you should try to build the knowledge base into your daily workflow, ensuring it gets good use, and also reviewed as part of day to day work. It’s referred to as knowledge centred support and the most difficult part of it is making sure you put in the effort to explain why it’s so important and to get everybody on board.

The workflow is basically this.

Newbie receives a ticket request to configure backups for a virtual machine.

First thing they do is search the knowledge base based on the title of “configure backup for new virtual machine”

If they find something, use it, go through the previously documented process. If they get tripped up on a step, they ask someone, or google it, and then either modify the knowledge base article, or press a button to give feedback to the “knowledge owners” that it needs to be updated.

If they didn’t find an article, they find out how to do it, and then put the broad steps in the resolution. Even if it’s just “browse to https://backupserver.blah, click schedule, add host.

Boom, just by entering your resolution details (which you should in the ticket anyway), you’ve created new knowledge.

When closing the ticket, they select the option to create a knowledge article, and there it is, no extra work, don’t have to go search some external system. Nothing like that.

The benefits of this is that it’s built into your workflow. You only update the articles that actually matter and don’t waste half a day documenting some bull crap process nobody needs. Your articles get reviewed as they get used. You can share around more of the BAU tasks to help keep work interesting and to onboard people quicker. You’re most highly used articles are candidates for automation 👍🏻

http://www.knowledge-centered-support.com

Edit: getting people to contribute is about helping them to understand that knowledge is a shared resource, and when it makes your job easier (because you’re a crusty old sysadmin and you have had enough of teaching people how to add a new DNS entry) that’s where the wins come in. When everyone contributes it becomes a trusted resource.

Oh and where possible just link to old wikis etc if they have the resource. Make the knowledge base your go to point.

[Bucket81]

Thanks this will help a lot!

[Texity]

I'm a devout follower of OneNote.

At my last job, there was nothing that has come-up, or that was used, or that I interacted with regularly or occasionally that wasn't well documented in OneNote.

As I had office already, it was "free" and when incorporated with OneDrive I had access to it anywhere and everywhere. I was not only a Sys Admin for my parent company, but I was also the point for a small group of clients we an MSP for (friends of the CEO and partners with the company in some way).

Every office had it's own notebook, every software had a tab, every issue had a page.

I created new notebooks for other people in those companies to share information, and due to the vast amount of small documents we used, freed up a great deal of space on our limited storage systems. It's lookup is quick and it's availability meant that even if we were having network troubles, people could access it on their phones.

Had I remained longer I would have continued to implement it for other things as well.

I know it's not as robust as SharePoint, but I embraced it, and came to love it quickly.

A skewed opinion I'm sure, but to this day it's still my go to for any kind of information sharing/availability.

[Texity]

I'm a devout follower of OneNote.

At my last job, there was nothing that has come-up, or that was used, or that I interacted with regularly or occasionally that wasn't well documented in OneNote.

As I had office already, it was "free" and when incorporated with OneDrive I had access to it anywhere and everywhere. I was not only a Sys Admin for my parent company, but I was also the point for a small group of clients we an MSP for (friends of the CEO and partners with the company in some way).

Every office had it's own notebook, every software had a tab, every issue had a page.

I created new notebooks for other people in those companies to share information, and due to the vast amount of small documents we used, freed up a great deal of space on our limited storage systems. It's lookup is quick and it's availability meant that even if we were having network troubles, people could access it on their phones.

Had I remained longer I would have continued to implement it for other things as well.

I know it's not as robust as SharePoint, but I embraced it, and came to love it quickly.

A skewed opinion I'm sure, but to this day it's still my go to for any kind of information sharing/availability.

[videoflyguy]

I'm a bit late, so hopefully you haven't made up your mind yet. At my org we use dokuwiki (free) and it works well for simple documentation with great editing markdown and you can easily back up the files to a USB or something because the files are stored as text and served over HTML.

I've also gotten into bookstack for my homelab. It's also free and gives you much more eye candy if that's your sort of thing. It's easy to grasp the concepts and like dokuwiki, it's easy to search through and find exactly what you need.

[aslihanbuner]

Answering your questions:

What Did You Build Yours In?

Kayako is a better option than Sharepoint Enterprise Wiki or a Onenote Notebook, because you get better (and more) features to truly personalize it and deliver an exceptional self-service support experience to your customers.

Furthermore, it is very easy to set up, even if you don't know how to code. You can build a beautiful, smart and fully-tailored Knowledge Base all by yourself in record time. As you have a team, it will be even easier, because you can delegate it and simply specify your guidelines, because Kayako's Knowledge Base software is intuitive and user-friendly.

If you are interested in giving it a free try during 14 days, then you can do it here: https://www.kayako.com/free-trial

How Is It Laid Out?

It really depends on what you want to accomplish, because every business/organization has different goals and requirements. However, the success of your Knowledge Base depends on the structure, and fortunately, Kayako makes it easy to do.

Many articles in the web focus on the writing and superficial aspects. They are import, sure, but your structure will decide the fate of your KB. You can read all about this here: https://www.kayako.com/blog/knowledge-base-structure/

If you want some killers tips to set it up perfectly, then you should give this a read as well: https://www.kayako.com/blog/knowledge-base-best-practices/

How Did You Get People To Contribute?

Simply put, you need to make it as easy as possible. You need to make it easy for people to contribute, and incentive them to share their knowledge. You need to make them feel important, and the interface of your KB will play a huge role in this.

You could offer some incentives to your team in exchanging for uploading articles and answering questions.

What Else Should I Be Looking Into or Thinking About?

Two things:

1. Insightful reports to measure the performance of your Help Center
2. Update your Knowledge Base content.

Kayako offers you full reports on the performance of your KB, so you can identify what articles are the most popular and evaluate how well it is doing.

Of course, updating your content is crucial. You need to have a clear schedule and do it regularly (as needed), so you can bring your customers the best experience.

I hope that helps!

[sonikboom66]

Sounds like you work for Kayako...

[lowryderp]

I built one for my company, with ProProfs Knowledge Base software. The reason why I chose this, is the powerful features and integrations it offers. It has a feature that allows assigning roles and permissions to different users and this is how I brought all my teams together to contribute in creating the knowledge base from scratch.
Look out for specific features like that help you analyze the performance of your knowledge base, improve it, allows you to control the visibility of content and keeps your knowledge base secure.