Building Your Own Knowledge Base?

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!"

Comments

Indiana University

[macdaddy]

I did some research into this a few years back when we in the helpdesk at Kansas State University decided we should put up some sort of knowledge base or searchable FAQ. Or generic html-based FAQ was greatly showing it's age and relied heavily on the time of senior consultants to update it. We were understaffed and overworked. Anything to help was needed. I found this one site purely on accident and was greatly impressed by it. Indiana University built their own knowledge base with in-house knowledge and resources. The outcome is very impressive.

Another method of doing this is to use the FAQ-O-MATIC, 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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Here is one solution...

[Ayende Rahien]

Since you are impressed with MS' Knowledge Base(Correctly, I would say). Why not explore the offers from MS itself?
http://www.microsoft.com/business/km/default.asp
Is a place to start.