Need: Knowledge sharing with stakeholders

A modern online knowledge base module was developed by LiteBreeze for integration with existing systems or to be used as a standalone application. The module allows clients to share information with stakeholders such as customers, partners, suppliers and employees in a user-friendly manner.

The goals are manifold: to save time for stakeholders by being able to store and categorize knowledge in one place, to foster collaboration and improve innovation, to improve communications with customers, and more.

Users can collaborate on content, rate knowledge and comment on the information. The knowledge may consist of articles, video, audio or files.

Knowledge base features

The knowledge base is developed using PHP and MySQL by the development team at LiteBreeze India.

Permissions management

Permissions management is an essential part of knowledge base software. You can decide on who should have access to what information.

You can share certain information publically with potential customers and other information may be restricted to employees, partner firms, suppliers or a subset of any of these groups.

Management of knowledge through categorization

Making knowledge easy to find and mapping together relevant information is one of the most important aspects of the knowledge base software.

By grouping and mapping knowledge together the end user can navigate through the information easily. The goal is that information will find the user, instead of the other way around.

The mapping is accomplished by:

• Set up of multi-level categories. Knowledge can be assigned to one or several categories.
• Knowledge can be tagged by the author or admin. Any phrase which the author feels is relevant will be stored as a tag. Tagging is more flexible and easier to manage than creating a new category. Tags allow the end user to easily navigate on to more relevant information.
• The meaning of a certain term can be defined in a glossary. Glossaries help the end user to get quickly introduced to a topic

Management of knowledge media files

Knowledge is stored in media such as formatted text articles, flash video and files such as Microsoft Word, Excel, plain text or any other kind of file.

Navigating and finding knowledge

Content is accessible through search engine friendly URLs. If your knowledge base is publically available search engines will also pick up keywords from the URL which can boost your search engine ranking triggering a virtuous circle of more commenting, more content and even better search engine placements.

Searching and navigation through content can be done in several ways including through simple search, advanced search, browsing tags and categories, and also by doing rating-wise and date-wise searches.

User management through existing web application

Management of users is usually done in an existing web application into which the knowledge base is integrated. PHP and MySQL technology allows for great flexibility here.

Core benefits of the knowledge base

Let the knowledge base be the core system to allow for knowledge management and knowledge distribution within your company or organization. Storing knowledge can save a considerable amount of time: not only does it save the time it is required for a person to several times explaining the same time.

It also connects people who are facing the same issues, letting them collaborate directly without going through an intermediary. This results in a new way of collaborating and innovating called enterprise 2.0.

Driving new business to your website

Many websites use frequently-asked-questions or a knowledge base application to share knowledge with potential and existing customers, partners and more. A very positive side effect of this is that it drives new traffic. Search engines love relevant content.

Information published on your website will result in other websites, link archives and search engines picking this up and linking back to you. This drives direct traffic. But that’s not all. Such ‘back-links’ as they are called by SEO professionals also boost your website’s search engine rank.