Sharing Knowledge with an Open Source Knowledge Base

A knowledge base is a great way to let customer and employees find the information they need. Written by subject matter experts, both within and without the company, a good knowledge base covers a wide variety of subjects, and grows over time as new articles, comments, and edits are made.

Some companies, particularly smaller ones, sometime choose an open source knowledge base for self-service management, because the source code used to build it is free. Plus, there is the often false assumption that using open source knowledge base software is the only way to build a customized knowledge base.

Ultimately, an open source knowledge base can actually cost more in resources than paid knowledge base software, because the company that uses it will have to use internal resources to build and update the open source knowledge base on their own, and when problems arise, will also have to rely on themselves to troubleshoot.

A good quality hosted knowledge base will have the benefits of an open source knowledge base without the downside of need to be built from the source code up. Doing so will not only save time and resources, but will allow companies to look for specific features that they require in a knowledge base, such as:

• Multilingual support
• Customization services
• Access to customer success and technical support
• Metrics and reporting
• Enterprise level security