Knowledge Base inspiration

[Paul Wiggers]

Hello all!

I am currently in the process of re-evaluating our knowledge base. We have first set this up with Refined but are finding it increasingly difficult to provide the best possible service to your customers.

I have described some issues we are running into into this post as well but in short.

• Cannot link from JSM to Refined custom domain
• Cannot have multi-language support
• Signing up is difficult since the signup links in the e-mail refer to the JSM KB and not to the custom domain
• Space management is out of control

I want to convince management that we and our customers are better off with the out-of-box KB and I am looking for inspiration. How have you setup your KB?

• Single space or multiple?
• Behind a login or open?
  • If open; How do you handle issue creation? 
• How do you handle multi-language support?
• How do you handle article creation?
  • Can any agent create articles or do you have an approval setup? If so, how did you set this up?
• How does it look? 
  • Examples please!
• Is there anything you don't like?

Thanks in advance!

[Kalin U]

Great questions! I am curious what other community members can share.

Our knowledge base is currently single-space and monolingual. We do not have a strict approval process too. Eager to explore options as we'll probably move to a multilingual setup and have an approval workflow. Sorry that I cannot provide insight and inspiration yet.

[Sierra Valdez]

Afternoon Paul, 

In my organization, I often oversee several confluence and jira software product sites due to my extensive experience in my company, which all of our current product sites are intended for internal personnel. My department is known as Technology, or in other words Software Development with project management. Our teams of developers and stakeholders heavily rely on knowledge bases to provide the best resource of training and software/request procedure-related information. 

How have you setup your KB? 

• Single space or multiple? 
  • Most of our sites are single space, because they revolve around a particular department's subject, so the department can locate their associated training without openly sharing with the rest of the company. This is very common as departments may have sensitive information they do not want others to know. 
    • Example: Field Ops
  • We do have a couple of sites that have 2-3 spaces within a site, but those are intended when a department has co-shared knowledge transfers. They provide insights of latest software integrations or Sale promotions known company-wide as examples.
    • Example: Technology, Marketing
• Behind a login or open?
  • If open; How do you handle issue creation? 
  • Almost all of our sites have the anonymous feature turned off, because again - sensitive material may be included, but this could be easily avoided with page/space permissions 
  • Most individuals within our company would simply hit the "Request Access" when they landed on a space or page that is not available to them. I receive those emails semi-frequently, but I do not handle all of the requests as we designate "Site Owners" who are responsible allowing individuals in with their respective site. I handle Technology primarily, but my Organizational Admin rights allow me to help department heads when they come to me for help.
  • Technology rules of thumb if someone requests access is validate they are internal personnel or contractors, followed by which page/space are they trying to access, if so discuss with the Project Manager of that particular software development to validate whether they need access. Turn down any who have no prior engagement with the software development team, and provide the correct access otherwise.
• How do you handle multi-language support?
  • Personally, I wished Atlassian always had a toggle feature that allows users to switch between ENG to SPAN, since a lot of our contractors are from hispanic/latino-orgin. 
  • Our multi-language support is very limited, but during my time of helping setup Field Operations knowledge base I worked with our customer care department to convert documents into Spanish with parent headers separated from english version to spanish. 
  • I had also attempted using one or two of the free translation apps from the Marketplace, but the ones we utilized were worthless. We quickly removed them as they didn't seem to work properly. This is not to say a Marketplace app who can properly translate doesn't exist - I may not of been lucky to find it.
• How do you handle article creation?
  • Can any agent create articles or do you have an approval setup? If so, how did you set this up?
  • The article creation is handled similarly to access answer above. We allow almost anyone to be capable of creating articles, except contractors. Some of our site's spaces have placed a page approval procedure setup with the use of Atlassian Marketplace app. This is critical as this impacts our customer care, sales teams, field operations, and anyone else who wants to pitch to our customers the current promos. The process follows roughly - Marketing Creator, Marketing Supervisor, Marketing Director, Approved/Denied, Publish. Here is a link to a lot of good apps.
  •  https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?query=approval
    • Example: Marketing
• How does it look? 
  • 
• Is there anything you don't like?
  • Atlassian doesn't support toggle/dropdown feature for changing languages!

These are my two cents. Our organization isn't perfect, but I try to implement changes for the better little by little. :)