Sharing Knowledge with an Open Source Knowledge Base

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

Some companies, particularly smaller ones, choose software that's open source for self-service management. There's an often false assumption an open source application is the only way to build a customized help guide.

Ultimately, open source can actually cost more in resources than paid 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. When problems arise or help guide files are misplaced, they'll have to rely on themselves to troubleshoot.

A hosted knowledge base will have the benefits of one built from open source, but without the need of building it from the source code up. Doing so will not only save time and resources, but will allow organizations 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