Hi Joanne,

You will reap the rewards of setting up HelpMaster to do your Knowledge Management!

You've asked a great question. We would love to hear how others are using their HelpMaster Knowledge Base. We put the KB through bootcamp for the last HelpMaster v12, read more about it here: http://www.helpmasterpro....-HelpMaster-v12.aspx

How you set up your KB will depend on what type of articles it will contain. Do you have some example titles or genres?

Hi Scott, Thanks for the response. We have a ton of documentation currently available under a support directory structure. It is relatively straight forward to find information if you know what it is called eg we have folders labelled A-Z and then documents located under there. The main problem is the inability to easily search these and also the accessibility hence why I thought using the KB would be of benefit - especially as our support team should always be in HelpMaster and therefore can easily link jobs to KB articles etc etc.

Broadly speaking the categories we would have are along the lines of software - MS products etc ; hardware - printers; router; PC; laptop; phones etc. That's where I sort of came unstuck - do we make them more generic and therefore potentially easier to categorise or should they be more specific? Initially I am thinking that it would be of use to our IT helpdesk but I also need to think longer term to ensure it is useful for our in house customers to use (they don't currently really use the web version but this is something I need to think about as well).

Typically the type of titles we have would be:
- wireless setup
- setting up your phone to access your work emails
- how to use inhouse software
- EFTPOS not working
etc etc

Would love to hear what others are doing.

Hi Joanne,

The knowledge base feature of HelpMaster is a key part of the overall HelpMaster system.  As Scott mentioned, we recently gave it a good upgrade, and future versions of HelpMaster will continue to improve and enhance the way that knowledge articles are used throughout HelpMaster.  The HelpMaster development roadmap contains things such as better auto-suggestions of knowledge, pro-active knowledge base article authoring, greater effectiveness on keyword tagging, a full role-based authoring and publishing model, and content indexing and searching for documents that are stored outside of HelpMaster, such as in your case.

Knowledge Management is a key component in the modern helpdesk.  With certifications and best-practice frameworks such as KCS (Knowledge Centered Support), the support industry is really waking up to the enormous potential that a well maintained, structured knowledge base can offer.  http://www.knowledge-centered-support.com/

I think you're on the right track with your knowledge planning.  Getting a good naming convention and nomenclature is a great starting point, because as your knowledge repository grows, a logical naming and ordering system will pay off.

Here at PRD Software, our knowledge base categories contain the following types:

• Known Error
• FAQ
• General
• Installation
• Internal Article

This gives each article a specific focus.  We then use the "Auto-general Knowledge Base article ID" feature (Administration > KB System Administration menu)  to create unique article IDs that are based on these categories.

We also use the "Searchability" tab extensively to add variations of spelling, acronyms and other words/tags that we find by examing the search logs.  It's always interesting to see what people are searching for, and how they phrase their search.

Here's the HelpMaster live knowledge base https://prdsoftware.com/h...geBase/KBSearch.aspx

Also, you may want to check out this publication : http://knowledgebird.com/...ng-a-knowledge-base/

This is a great starting point when starting out with knowledge management.  This was written by a former user of HelpMaster who now works and speaks in the knowledge management space.

Hope this helps.  Please keep us up to date with how your knowledge management project goes!

Rod

It took me two years to turn on full text search, because I just didn't think to do it. If you haven't turned it on yet or if it isn't on by default, do that, because it will make your help desk life so much easier.

Where categories are concerned, don't provide too many. Don't offer a miscellaneous or general category. What sort of information do you value when you report against knowledge base use? You have to balance those needs against not bamboozling those who create and file the knowledge base articles with too many choices.
Maybe hardware, software, mobile is enough. Maybe you'll need another level to break down hardware and mobile further. I wouldn't go further than a 2nd level in the heirarchy, if I can avoid it.

It's been a while since I've used HelpMaster, so I can't remember how the KB is presented to customers, but it may be worth consulting a couple of them on what makes sense to them as far as findability goes.

I could keep going.. but I'll stop there and I'm happy to add more if you have other questions.

 

p.s. thanks for the shout-out Rod.