Update: This post is based on the Knowledgebase prior to version 4.2, please refer to the retooled carbon copy on the wiki.

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Using_the_Knowledgebase_to_share_resources_the_way_you_want

If you’ve been using Cerb4 for a while, you know there’s more to it than just sharing e-mail responsibilities; the software prides itself on being a suite of collaboration tools. And while most of these features, like the tasks system and the feedback plugin, are fairly self-explanatory, one of the more complex tools to grasp is the Knowledgebase. Compared to everything else, the Knowledgebase requires a bit more understanding to use it to its full potential.

At its core, the KB is a collection of informative “articles” your workers create inside the Helpdesk, as a way to keep “documentation” relevant to your organization available for reference. When used properly, it can serve as a collaborative resource for both your workers and your users to search through when they need to find information — you might think of it as a FAQ of sorts.

If you’ve read my earlier write-up detailing the Fetch & Retrieve tool, the Knowledgebase will sound very familiar, almost too similar perhaps. Both serve the same general purpose as an information resource, both are used for retrieving documentation collected and updated by your organization, and both allow you to search and grab text right from your reply box. But that’s where the similarities end; it’s the few differences that makes the KB valuable in its own right, and worth using in addition to F&R.

• Unlike F&R which “taps” into existing outside resources such as blogs, wikis and forums, the KB is a single resource created and maintained internally within the Helpdesk. All of your workers can edit and develop new KB articles, so if you don’t want workers making changes to your external resources, you can let them generate content for the KB instead.
• All or portions of the KB can be opened to the public at large. With the public KB in place, your users can go to a single search portal and find any relevant information without bothering your staff with e-mails. By locking out portions of the KB, users can only see the information you want them to see, while at the same time, workers can maintain a “private” section of the KB for your organization’s own internal use.

With those details out of the way, getting the KB production-ready requires two stages of configuration corresponding to the two use cases just mentioned. The first half consists of creating your KB articles and prepping it for your workers to use within the Helpdesk. The second half is directed at deploying your KB to a public directory, which users can access outside of the Helpdesk.

Since explaining the entire process is difficult to do in one reasonably sized write-up, I’m going to only cover the first half here. By the end of this article you should have an internal KB setup for your workers to use (we’ll save launching the public KB for another time).

So the first thing you have to do before anything else is create your basic topics, or categories, to house your KB articles. Categories are loosely structured in a tree-like hierarchy, with a parent having multiple children (I say loosely because the KB can have more than one root). In this case the roots are referred to as top-level categories, where all other categories spawn from. To start click ‘helpdesk setup’ then the ‘Knowledgebase’ tab and add your first couple of categories.

Categories can be anything you want to help organize your KB articles into logical groupings. I’ve created two generic top-level categories here: “Private (Internal)” and “Public (external)”, to make it clear that one category will be for internal use and the other will be opened to the public. In real life, the “private” category might be the name of the software your workers are training to use, while the “public” category could be the name of a product you sell to your customers.

Once you create the top-level categories you have a couple of choices; you can either create subcategories or start creating the actual KB articles. In both cases you need to move on to the Knowledgebase section by clicking ‘kb’ in the main menu, and then clicking into one of your top-level categories. Clicking the ‘Add Article’ button will bring up an “editing” window where you can fill in all the details of your new KB article.

Here you create a title, pick which category or categories it belongs to, and write down the content of the article in html or plain text. Once you save, the article will appear in your ‘Articles’ list at the bottom.

At this point the KB has all the basics down and is ready for use. From this section, your workers can of course browse the KB tree and look up information, however they can also search the KB while they’re answering tickets. As you write your replies you will see a button named ‘Knowledgebase’; click the button, pick a category if you wish, and then start a search. The titles of any relevant articles will appear and clicking one will open a pop-up window with the contents of that article. From here you are free to copy and paste any information you find useful into your reply.

As you can see, when used in conjunction with replies the KB works very similar to F&R — workers can refer to it whenever they need to look up any information. The next major application of the KB is letting your users explore categories of your choosing, outside of the Helpdesk. We’ll cover that in part 2.

-joegeck@wgm