Looking to create a Knowledge base, any suggestions?

[TechieDaz]

Afternoon all

Looks the snow is settling here again and it's not even been 2 weeks since the last lot , have too much to do for it to snow lol

Ok, I'm looking to create a Knowledge base, I thought perhaps I could try Microsoft Access, but unfortunately I do not know it well enough - at least not the point of scripting and creating form linkings etc.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Perhaps you have one, or know what I could try?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Daz

[DaveP]

Are you running a help desk at the moment?

If not you could deploy a helpdesk with a knowledge base included. We had a helpdesk with this function and I found it very useful [We had to stop using it for reasons too complex to go into here but it wasn't anything to do with the helpdesk itself]

[deano]

ManageEngine help desk has this feature called solutions. We use it all the time to document help guides for all of the team.

Think they have changed pricing so its free for up to 5 technicians

[RichCowell]

Try Spiceworks... it's quite a powerful piece of kit, and won't cost you a penny!

[Netman]

Freshdesk is also free for a basic setup - helpdesk and knowledge base - Help Desk Software for Customer Support | Online Help Desk - Freshdesk - No inventory though...

[Valyyn]

I set up a small wiki on a spare bit of server using XWiki, which works quite nicely as a wiki/knowledgebase.
Our one is only accessible internally, but if you want to have a look at the software, here's an xwiki I worked on at my last job:
http://nexus.aber.ac.uk

[Geoff]

I second the wiki idea. That way you can have input from a user point of view (I know from practice it can be difficult to get users to read an internal wiki though, let alone contribute).

[EvLPhenom]

We use GLPI for helpdesk, inventory and knowledge base. Works well.

[Danp]

I would say a Wiki too, we use http://www.dokuwiki.org here

[Rawns]

Not of much use to you, but an idea to implement maybe?

In my old place of work, our helpdesk solution had a built in knowledge base. What was really good was that users could self-log their own calls online, but before they could continue, it would list suitable knowledge base articles based on the problem they were logging. It would "advise" users to try the KB solution in the first instance, but even better was that once the call was logged, we could actually see if the user actually opened any of the recommended KB solutions. Then when we rang them and asked "did you try this KB solution?" and they said "yes", we could say "LIES!!!!!" (in a more polite way) and send them back to the original recommended KB page which would usually fix their problem.

[tmcd35]

I suppose the question is - is it an internal or external or both KB? Different audiences may have different requirements. We use MediaWiki as an internal, department only Knowledge Base, that has become vital to our regular work. For an external, staff access, KB we currently use Spiceworks. We are currently reviewing our helpdesk and assist databases and want our main staff KB to be tightly integrated with the helpdesk(s) and assts(s) databases.

[TechieDaz]

Try Spiceworks... it's quite a powerful piece of kit, and won't cost you a penny!

I have actually used Spiceworks before in my previous role in a secondary school, not the side of the Knowledge base though. Will have a look into it as I know the helpdesk part very well. Not sure how to deploy this with my team though, as they have purchased a custom helpdesk which we are supposed to use.

Thanks for this.

[TechieDaz]

Thank you all for your suggestions so far it's been very helpful - I'll have to start looking into each one and decide which is best to be used.

[CyberNerd]

Over the years we've used RTFM from RequestTracker and MediaWiki.
Now we use Google Docs - create the docs in google then share them with staff (and publicly on the website for students). It's very flexible and being google powered is also very searchable.

[TheScarfedOne]

If you have an intranet, that's works well too...we've also added current system status and planned maintenance there tok