Forum Discussion
Knowledge Base - setting up within O365/Sharepoint
Thanks for your comments Ivan, Juan. Any advice from you, or anyone else viewing this, on recommendations for a third party product, or someone who can help be our 'sounding board' to build our own, would be greatly appreciated. :-)
Hi Yeow,
One of the third party products i have used in the past is Knowledge Base from Bamboo which is pretty impressive but i think the pricing is a bit on the high end side.
Anyways, for OOTB Wiki you get three options and its up to you which one to choose from.
- Site Pages Document Library: For me personally this is the easiest and best way to get started because you already have a Wiki library on your SharePoint site. If you click on Site Contents and look at Site Pages – you will notice that its a Wiki Library mentioned in the TYPE Column. Now Click on Site Pages and the Home page will come up which is the Homepage of your SharePoint site. Whenever you add or create other pages on your SharePoint site, they all end up in this Site Pages Library. This actually means that can add Wiki or Knowledge Base pages/articles right inside the Site Pages Wiki Library, without creating an extra one. The only difference between Site Pages Library and Wiki Library is that you won’t get Updated Pages section with the Site Pages which is a unique feature of Wiki Library mentioned below as the 2nd option.
- Wiki Library Web Part: For this option click on Site Contents > Add an App > Wiki Library. Once created, you will see two default pages which appear OOTB and you can create new ones. You will also notice how similar it is from the first option i mentioned above. Try creating some New Pages and add in some stuff like text, pics, vidz, etc and you will notice that the Updated Pages section in the upper left-hand corner shows you the recently updated pages.
- Enterprise Wiki: Now this one is a template which you choose when you create a new site and in a way, you will actually be creating a separate site (subsite) specifically for your Wiki. Please do remember that this Site Template is only available on site collections with publishing features enabled and my two cents would be to play with it before going ahead with the Publishing feature.
All three options have pros and cons so it all boils down to what exactly do you plan to achieve. Again, i believe that its always a good idea to start small and then slowly build up as Users come with ideas and suggestions. Even if you don't intend to go ahead with OOTB features - at least you will get to know what your Users are expecting and they feel comfortable with. It would be a good approach to see the 3rd party products with your scope / requirements in mind.
Taken right from SharePoint Maven
I've used a combination of these since there are certain limitations of Site Pages library to create consistent pages via layout templates.
Also, the biggest drawback of non-Enterprise Wikis are tagging capabilities and adding categories to pages effectively. SharePoint gives you a starting point but not necessarily an OOTB knowledge base solution.
The last I checked the Bamboo Wiki editor is not available for SP Online.
I am trying to use the Enterprise version as a proof of concept, hoping someone will comeup with a good after market tool and MS will significantly improve the OOB Wiki.
An isssue I thought I had resolved was replacing the file name with the title in the page header. It looked good until I viewed the page with Read Only permissions. All I saw as a reader was the file name and not the title. How does just changing permissions change the ability to show the file title verses the file name. This really HURTs.
Any suggestion or answers from anyone.
Merritte
Problem solved. The person that had modified the template page for us had not published it. Once the page was published, everything worked.
- If you find anything, please post back!!
I have not found an intuitive way to manage a Knowledge base with Office 365, however, Confluence by Atlassian has an out of the box capability which I wish Office would mimic.
