Knowledge Base Server Beta available as CommunityServer Add-In
Knowledge Base Server (KBS) is an add-in product for Community Server that lets you store and manage factual data. Community Server has many components; but the two that are most commonly used are blogs and forums. Blogs are the voice of a single person or a team. Forums are the conversation of the community. Knowledge Base Server brings an official company voice where questions can be answered.
Knowledge Base Server will be your factual store, a section of your website that can be the voice of the company, department, or team where consumers of your product or service will come to find answers.
With Knowledge Base Server as an effective store for factual data, what can we do to leverage all the factual data that we already have in Community Server? Knowledge Base Server includes several features that help you to populate and promote your Knowledge Base content.
The first question people usually have about Knowledge Base Server is, what's the difference between a forum and a knowledge base? Why not just setup a single forum called "Knowledge Base" and have that be used as your factual store? Well, we see that a Knowledge Base has more functionality than just housing a set of posts.
We are pleased to announce that the public beta for Knowledge Base Server is now available.
Copy Forum Post / Thread
Forums are used for conversations. Person A asks a question, person B answers, person C chimes in, and before you know it, a full conversation has begun, and hopefully the original question gets answered. This answer can come as a single person's response, but many times is answered from a combination of people. This is one of the real benefits of community. So let's imagine that Person A's question was answered, but it was answered over a series of 30 posts in a thread. This is not an uncommon scenario. After Knowledge Base Server is installed, a Knowledge Base Administrator will see a "Copy to KB" button on the toolbar. This option allows either a single post or a series of posts to be copied into a new Knowledge Base article. The content is not just copied verbatim, instead a nice dialog pops up for you to dissect all the posts, and create a concise Knowledge Base article from the contents of the selected posts. Now you have a simple knowledge base article that was created from the Forum thread. Credit is given as a "contributor" to the original forum post authors in the finished Knowledge Base article.
Knowledge Base Suggest
One of the most common complaints for a Forums Administrator is managing duplicate posts. KB Suggest intercepts new forum posts, does a quick scan for the keywords in the post, searches against Knowledge Base Server, and suggests Knowledge Base articles for the user to read. The user has the option to say "Yes, this answered my question" and if so, the post is not submitted to the Forums. If the user answers "No, these didn't help" or the user does nothing, the post is still submitted.
Knowledge Base Terms
After you have created a Knowledge Base article, it doesn't do any good unless you can drive traffic to it. For the example, let's say you have an error that you've been trying to solve for a long time. Your community users have been talking about it, and trying to figure it out. Now you have a solution and have written a Knowledge Base article. If you add a KB Term to the article, everywhere that the term is used in the forums, it will render as a link back to the Knowledge Base article. Using KB Terms is a great way to drive traffic back to the right answer in the Knowledge Base without having to manually edit all the old forum posts.
Below are links back to the website, that have video tutorials on the above features.
Installation Directions
Data Entry (Categories / Articles)
Copy Post or Thread to Knowledge Base
Knowledge Base Suggestions
Knowledge Base Terms