SharePoint Tip of the Month

February 2009: Implementing a SharePoint Knowledge Base

It’s not reflected in your stock price. It can’t be measured on your balance sheet. And no KPI or graph will tell you how well you are doing at it. But few would argue that organizational knowledge is one of their corporation’s most valuable asset. In a 21st Century world, it is also the most difficult to hold on to. For a variety of reasons – aging workforce approaching retirement, geographically-dispersed employees, and employees changing jobs at a more rapid pace – employees come and go. And when they leave they take their accumulated knowledge with them. With the right set of tools, organizations can capture and retain employee knowledge in order to preserve this valuable asset.

Abel Solutions has always recognized the value of knowledge sharing among employees. Lunch and learn sessions, collaboration sites, a home-grown web-based system for collecting knowledge have been their historic tools for sharing knowledge with one another. Later, a second-generation of our online Knowledge Base was built based on an earlier version of SharePoint but offered several limitations.

• Location ambiguity – Too many structured categories left confusion about which bucket was the best place to submit a contribution.
• Accessibility – As many more employees would work from outside of the office, posting became more time consuming, and for employees who were offline, impossible.
• Searching - Searches were difficult and yielded limited immediate information, making it time consuming for employees to find the information they were looking for.
• Inquiries – For employees who wanted to know something, the existing framework led them to emailing a group of coworkers. Subsequent replies would remain within the email paradigm, effectively becoming lost knowledge for anyone who had the same question in the future.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) presented Abel Solutions with an opportunity to reinvent our Knowledge Base. The core of the new Knowledge Base is the SharePoint Blog site. With a few minor customizations to the site and a third-party add-on, all of the limitations with the old framework were easily addressed.

The Blog site allows users to submit an article, place it in a category, and assign other metadata values for fields that are relevant to the company. Category navigation on the side bar allows users to click on a category and view all recent posts to that category. A minor tweak to the Category column to allow multiple selections removed the ambiguity over which bucket to place an article in.

Using the SharePoint incoming email settings feature, an email address was easily assigned to the blogs list. This allowed users to submit articles to the blog without being in the SharePoint site. This became especially advantageous for those who spent a lot of time outside of the office or even offline. Any email contributions could sit in the Outbox until the next time they went online, at which point they would automatically get submitted to the Knowledge Base. Email contributions to the blog were placed into an Uncategorized bucket and exposed through SharePoint list views for later categorization by either the original contributor or others visiting the Knowledge Base.

The search features of MOSS allow for relatively simple customization, leading to better searching and better search results (see the January, 2008 TOTM, titled Getting the Most out of Enterprise Search http://www.abelsolutions.com/Newsroom/
SharePointTOTM/Pages/TOTM20080101.aspx for more information). A custom Knowledge Base search scope was created to filter results to just Knowledge Base contributions. Modifications to the search result set allowed for displaying of Categories, Client and other relevant custom metadata fields, making it easy for employees to quickly browse through relevant search results, without having to wait for the underlying item to open. Finally, a third-party tool available for download, Faceted Search http://www.codeplex.com/FacetedSearch/ , displays different grouping of metadata fields, or search facets, allowing the user to further refine the search results set by clicking on one of the filter links.

With the above changes in place, employees were encouraged to email questions directly into the Knowledge Base in place of the current practice of directly emailing coworkers. SharePoint alerts and custom views work in tandem to ensure that appropriate people are notified when questions are emailed into the Knowledge Base. Alert notifications provide links to the blogs, allowing those with answers to access the post and provide comments and answers. Additional custom notifications are issued when other employees provide responses to such inquiries. The net result is that employees retain the immediate impact of email discussions, while the knowledge contained in the discussion is captured in the Knowledge Base.

Corporate knowledge can come in many shapes and sizes, and numerous 21st century studies have been conducted to define, analyze, and place a value on the notion of corporate knowledge. While there is no quantifiable way to measure its value, knowledge is clearly an important asset to all companies and organizations. SharePoint, with a few customizations and a third-party add-on or two, can provide the tools necessary to facilitate a culture of capturing and sharing knowledge among employees.