Previous Chapter: Part 5 - The Reporting
One of the biggest challenges in an IT (or any other) department is to have the knowledge that lives within the department combined in one place that is accessible to everyone. Creating a knowledge base is difficult; keeping it up-to-date is even more difficult.
As we discussed in the chapter about People management, the whole idea behind people management in SharePoint is to create a community within the department. The success of a knowledge base will depend greatly on this community. If everybody works on his or her island, a knowledge base will almost never succeed, simply because the people have no sense of sharing information with people they know nothing about. Within a community however, people get more and more sensitive to the needs of others and therefore are much more willing to share information.
SharePoint is a perfect platform for not only a community, but also a knowledge base for that community. In the next sections, we will go through the possibilities of knowledge base. Starting at the basics and ending with a more advanced kind of knowledge base for departments that are completely integrated in SharePoint.
Starting with Search
When people think of a knowledge base, most of them think of one place where all information can be found. Although a central site with most of the documentation is a good basis from which to start a knowledge base, it’s not the simplest form of knowledge base. To find the simplest form, we must ask ourselves what a knowledge base is. A knowledge base in essence is a way for people to find the information they need to solve a problem in a straight forward way. So what is the most straight forward way to find information? Right! A search engine.
In essence, the place information is stored has of absolutely no impact on the success of your knowledge base. It’s the fact whether or not you can find the information you need in one search query or not. Rather than trying to put all the information in one place, it’s better to start with a central search engine where you can search all storage places. Why you might ask? Well, getting all information on one topic (an application, a product, etc.) in one place is very difficult and a lot of work. It might be spread over SharePoint site, databases, shared folders, other websites, etc. Instead of duplicating all this information, you build a search engine that can search all these different locations. That way, you can gradually centralize all the information, but you’ll still be able to find all the information you need from the moment the search engine is available.
SharePoint provides this federated search capabilities through Search Server. It will enable you to search SharePoint, databases, websites and shared folders in one place, without having to copy all the information in one place. The best advice for starting a knowledge base is to make all the information available. When the information is available for search, you can start planning for centralization if this is necessary, but the biggest benefit will already be there. Finally your people can find the information they need.
Creating a knowlegde base
Of course, searching all these different locations will still leave you with a scattered knowledge base. The information is there, but still you want to evolve into a system where information is stored in a centralized environment. That is where your community comes in. When everybody is already used to storing information in SharePoint, they will have no difficulty creating a centralized SharePoint knowledge base. However this doesn’t mean that everything is stored in one SharePoint site. They idea is to have a logical knowledge base that is easiest explained by an example.
The center of your knowledge base would be a SharePoint site that incorporates all the documentation about products you work with and documentation of projects and applications you have build within the department. The easiest way to accomplish this is first to store all product documentation in this site and nowhere else. Second, upon closing a project site, copy all the documentation of the project site into the knowledge base. That way, no information is lost by archiving or deleting project sites.
Besides this central site, the best way to extend your knowledge base is by using MySites or group sites. The idea being that specialists share information in blogs, wikis, discussion boards or documents about their expertise. When you have a good community within your department that uses MySites and group sites frequently, this information will also be easy for them to find even without having to centralize everything. Search capabilities will still have to be provided over all these sites, but now all the information is on SharePoint so it can be found even more rapidly and can all be managed in the same way.
So a good knowledge base consists of central information completed with live information from your internal community. That way it’s easy to find, the community will work even better together and you can manage all information in the same way on one platform.
A learning center within your company
Of course you can still go one step beyond just providing static information on one platform and that is to build an e-learning site from your knowledge base. Atop the existing knowledge base, you can build a site that people can use to educate themselves in the use of products and applications. By using step-by-step guides, how-to documents and even video tutorials, you can have a site that not only provides information, but can also educate your staff. Typically, a group of specialists (f.e. architects) can provide these resources to educate the rest of the department in how they should use certain products or tools or even what the company prescribed procedures are in certain areas.
This site can be used not only to provide the initial education, but also to keep the people updated when procedures change, new products or versions arrive, etc. As an added bonus of such an e-learning site, it can also provide an ideal boot-camp environment for new employees or contractors to learn the “how’s” and “what’s” of your department or company in a very efficient and effective way.
Especially in very rigid company environments that have a lot of bureaucratic procedures, a site like this can prove to be extremely valuable not only to people having to use these procedures, but also for managers to get the word out to everyone when a procedure changed.
Conclusion
Conclusion of the use of knowledge bases in SharePoint is that it’s very easy to build one, but it’s important to do this step-by-step. Trying to build a complete knowledge base for your company or department from scratch will probably prove too expensive or difficult. Therefore, starting with a good federated search and gradually building a SharePoint knowledge base with the help of your internal community will prove to not only be less expensive but also a lot more effective.
By Ronny Gabriels, Functional Analyst and ex-.net Solution Architect