How to choose a wiki based solution for a knowledgebase

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Wed, 08/17/2005 - 2:40pm.

Our team is required to provide in person and phone first through fourth level support for our customers. We do this very well, but we also face the same challenges other teams do. We're looking for solutions on how to overcome these challenges and we think a wiki can help with data management.

A wiki is collaborative software that allows a team of people to enter and update information. Typically, a wiki will have a database back end that allows for maximum data management.

Our team has reached the point where we needed a knowledge base for our technical documents. The challenges mentioned above include being able to very quickly ramp up new team members in our support processes. At this juncture, we have silos of information among our sites and that's not maximizing our information. We have tried to adapt our forum software to use as a knowledge base, but it hasn't worked out well.

On a conference call last week, one of our team members demonstrated a simple Microsoft Access database he constructed that included a range of support information. It was just a quick hop, skip and jump to knowledgebases and we all agreed a wiki would make a perfect knowledgebase.

Why we chose to use a wiki:

1) No programming. Since we're a support team we don't have any natural programmers on our team. We do have a couple of folks that will dig in and learn something if needed, but we're not in the development business. A wiki offers us the ability to drop the software into place and begin working without any PHP programming involved.

2) Easy editing. The wiki will offer a code based WYSIWYG interface that will make updating easy. Instead of someone having to reformat each entry, we can offer templates that will do this automatically.

3) User level access control. We're all about the openness of our documentation, but there are times where you don't want guests to see sensitive information. The wiki allows us to define the presentation layer based on user level access.

We've just begun our project and the first step is getting it installed. As Microsoft Windows is our corporate standard network operating system, we've chosen to use that as a platform. We're using Apache as our web server with a MySQL database backend.

The wiki software we're using is called MediaWiki and it's what runs the Wikipedia.

We run our projects very fast and tight, so we'll know within three weeks if this meets our needs.