Knowledge base appliction?

[311Hemi]

Any of you techie's on the board have a recommendation for a good knowledge base type application. I have a tech support group of 6 techs and we are currently looking to possibly add a tool like this....have looked at one so far (that was ok but might not fit our group the greatest) just looking for a few others to check out.

We support medical devices/computer(mainly desktop's).

Thanks!

[Joe_WaZoo]

It might be a good idea given that it is searchable. We had a guy one time who wrote our own internal VB application web based application for us back when I was an Application Engineer. It worked out well as we were able to build an online FAQ that eventually others could search for answers to the same questions before calling in. Of course it was only as good as the info inputted into it. We had some ApEs that were not team players.

Now we are back to each man for himself.

Joe_WaZoo

[sstodvictory]

I'll take a crack at this John, but you left a lot of variables unfilled, like what server platform you want it to run on, if you want it to be a web-based application, if you want it to use a relational database backend and if so what RDB, and if there are any particular language requirements for the user front-end (PHP, Perl, JAVA, etc). You'll probably find the largest selection among those written to use MySQL and PHP.

In general though, getting the most out of a knowledgebase can be a bit perplexing at first. It may not be clear exactly what topic heirarchy is most useful and it could take a couple of starts to get it right. It also requires one to form new habits about how they store, retrieve and use knowledge.

I've used a personal knowlegebase application called "Lucid Fried Eggs" for the past several years in my workplace and it has been a great help. I have 10 Meg of notes and file uploads in mine now. I chose Lucid because of its simplicity relative to full blown wikis or blogs or whatever people call the website content management applications, and its flexibility with respect to creating and changing the topic heirarchy. Development ceased in 2001 and its not really meant for use by a community. Its gotten out of step with the newer versions of PHP so it also needs to be hacked a bit to install it.

My suggestion is go to the Lucid download page at Freshmeat and check out the other knowledgebase products that are mentioned on that page, and also do a search and see what comes up that may be newer.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lucid/

A basic decision you need to make is do you want ownership of notes to be held by all individuals in your community, or do you want user-based ownership, or do you want that to be selectable by the author (original owner) of an entry?

Good luck. If you find the right one it can revolutionize the way you work. It has for me.

Steve

[Chris 2]

:gunrev: And what language are you guys speakin????? :SouthPark

[311Hemi]

Steve, thanks much for the info. That is giving me some things to look at!

One app we have here now is Thebrain. I have not seen this yet but a couple co-workers did not think it would work out the best for us....not sure exactly why.

As far as requirements we are fairly open at this time. We are running 2003 server.....and other than that a web based app would probably be better. No major language requirements at this time. I am just starting to look into this so I need to do some research to see whats out there...and then go from there.

I will let you know if I have any more questions.

I appreciate the response.