Knowledge Base

There are three main use cases for the Knowledge Base. The first use case is the community knowledge base. This is ideal for knowledge bases supporting a specific domain like a particular product line.

The second use case is for a global knowledge base which works well for corporate content that applies to all staff.

Finally, there is support for the personal knowledge base for tracking content for your own reference.

Enabling the Knowledge Base feature

To turn on the Knowledge Base feature for a given community or site (including My Content), do the following:

1. Go into Site Settings > Manage Site Features.
2. Activate the Newsgator Knowledge Base (Web) feature.

To specify which community or site contains the global knowledge base, do the following:

1. Go to Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications.
2. Select the Newsgator Learning Point Service and fill in the URL as seen in below screenshot.

Since the knowledge base items are stored in a Wiki Library, permissions to add and view these items is controlled by access to this list.

Creating Knowledge Base items

There are a number of ways of creating knowledge base items:

Creating Knowledge Base Items from the Knowledge Base tab

You can create a knowledge base item by following the below steps:

1. Click on Add a Knowledge base Item from the Knowledge Base tab. This pop up the Add a Knowledge Base Item panel.



2. Fill in the fields accordingly and click on Create to create the knowledge base article.

The article is created in the current community. The article can be further edited, liked and commented on.

The article shows up in the Knowledge Base tab accordingly as well as in the stream as seen below in the two images below.

Creating Knowledge Base Items using the Bookmarklet

Knowledge base items can be created from any web page by using the bookmarklet.

To install the bookmarklet, do the following:

1. Drag onto your browser toolbar the Add a Knowledge Base Item link that is below the Add to Knowledge Base web part on the Knowledge Base tab.



2. Once the bookmarklet has been installed, go to the web page that you would like to create the knowledge base article from and click on the Add to Knowledge Base bookmarklet.
3. A knowledge base item input panel appears prompting you for the same information as creating it from with the Knowledge Base tab with a few exceptions.

   You are prompted for the knowledge base you would like to add it to. This could include:

   • a global knowledge base, if enabled
   • all communities that you belong to that have a knowledge base
   • a personal knowledge base, if created

The title is auto-filled with the title from the web page. The description is auto-filled with the URL of the web page.

The system also tracks the URL internally so it can potentially warn (but not prevent) future users from creating a knowledge base item for this URL for a given knowledge base.

4. Click on Create to create the knowledge base article.

Creating Knowledge Base Items from the stream

Knowledge base items can be created directly from the stream by clicking on the Add to Knowledge Base link on the stream item itself as seen below.

This applies to the stream within a community or My Newsfeed.

A knowledge base item input panel appears prompting you for the knowledge base you would like to add it to. The name field is blank when the form first opens.

The description contains content from the post itself including the original post and all of the comments and who made the comment.

The References section contains the link to the original post. If it’s a question, the responses also indicate which responses were marked as an answer.

The contributor should enter a title that summarizes what the knowledge base item is about and make it easy to discover.

If the knowledge base item is being created from a question, the contributor may also want to delete comments that are not answers and potentially augment and re-word the answer.

The tag entry area does auto- suggest from the managed sterm store.

Creating Knowledge Base Items from a document

Sometimes its helpful to created a knowledge base item from a document to provide extra data about how the document might be used, to give extra visibility to it and to allow users to comment on it.

It’s a nice way for authors to get feedback on a document outside of their immediate review circle.

To create a knowledge base article from a document, do the following:

1. Go to the document list.
2. Click on the document in the list and select Create a Knowledge Base Item from the menu.



This pops up an input panel with the title auto-filled from the document name and the link to the document in the description.

3. Edit the title to make it discoverable, add extra comments in the description field as well as tags.

   

The created article is shown below.

Browsing and searching

After some knowledge base articles have been added, users can search for knowledge base items and filter by most recent, most like, most viewed and by keyword.

Knowledge Base Home

Multi-farm support

For Knowledge Base, articles can be created in knowledge bases that exist in the same farm from which you are posting.

The simplest example of this is creating an article from a stream in the same community that you are targeting the publication of the article.

The Add to Knowledge Base page only shows Knowledge Bases that the currently logged in user has rights to add to.

This page will only ever show Knowledge Bases from the same farm as the page currently being viewed. Knowledge Base entries are also added via a bookmarklet in the browser.

The bookmarklet only lets you add Knowledge Base articles to the same farm from which you originally added the bookmarlet to your browser.