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At a current client of mine, we've had some good experiences with Jive
Software's knowledge base <http://www.jivesoftware.com/>, although the
knowledge base is no longer available standalone. It's been rolled up
into their monolithic kbase/socialnetworking/wiki/dishwasher/
bulletinboard/flyingcar application called Jive SBS. For people
looking only for a knowledge base, the rest of it is somewhat
overkill, but it might be worth looking at.
As a standalone knowledge base, it was easy to create documents,
security was fairly straightforward, and they had a good moderator
setup (where any new document had to be approved first, and the
moderators could be defined for each category of document). The
version we use has some problems (buggy HTML editor, PDF indexing
issues) that are addressed in later releases or in Jive SBS, but of
course I can't get permission to upgrade. :-)
The search index is updated regularly for its own native entries, as
well as for the contents of attached Word/PDF/Excel documents. So
searching is useful.
I have no idea of pricing. Which may be why my very casual request to
upgrade was denied.
Hope that helps,
Mike
On Oct 20, 2009, at 2:43 PM, Robert Lauriston wrote:
> What do you like for building a knowledge base?
>
> I've been looking at SharePoint's KB template, and, wow, even for
> Microsoft this is shoddy work. By default, the search box for a KB
> does not find any KB articles. To make that happen, you need to
> customize the search crawl, which may require privileges not typically
> assigned to a KB site admin. And the index is not updated
> automatically when you add a new article. And the index includes all
> page content, not just article content.
>
> I guess SharePoint is to Web publishing as MS Word is to print
> publishing.
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing
> Table of
> Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
> 2009 tips, tricks, and best practices.
>http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
>
> Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
> authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
> once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version
> control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
>
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Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices. http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-
