Sharepoint Knowledge Base

McCalvin

I wasn't exactly sure where to post this....

I want to set up an internal Knowledge Base and was wondering if SharePoint could do the job?

Has anyone experience with SharePoint at all, and know of any functions that could accommodate the above?

The knowledge Base will need 3-4 layers of topics. A general search function (Search Document name, and document), search by topic and search by subtopic.

Any suggestions welcome

Thanks

tecno40

I Know you can create a search engine for your whole site with sharepoint+frontpage.

stevenmu

Yes sharepoint can this, or most of it at least. There's two ways you could go about it.

If your knowledge is already in documents, you might want to do it by creating a document library(s). You could then seperate out the topics using either different libraries or folders within a single library, and use folders for the subtopics. You could also put all documents in a single library and folder and use custom columns (topic, subtopic) to group the items giving you a kind of tree structure to work down.

If you don't already have the documents you could also use a wiki page library, again using custom columns for topic subtopic etc.

How the search works will depend on the version of sharepoint you use. If you're using the free version (Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0), it will simply be a once-search-box-fits-all type approach. Searching a term will search topic, title, content all in one, across the whole site. If you go with the paid for version (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services), you will be able to create search contexts targeting different things, so someone searching could select from a drop down if they want to search by content, title, topic etc. (having the topics and subtopics in custom columns should help with this).

If you have access to a Windows Server 2003 R2 machine, it's pretty simple to download WSS 3.0 and install it and have a play around. If it's only ever going to be used for this, and will get relatively low scale usage, you could probably then just make that install live when you're happy with it. If you want something more complicated or with higher scale usage, you'll need to plan a live install a bit more.

McCalvin

Thanks All-

I'll get a fresh install and go playing.