A question, but not one of *those* questions

[sunnylioness.livejournal.com]

Fellow Tech Supporters-- I am going to start shopping new knowledge base applications, so that we might possibly cut down on the types of phone calls that make for classic ihatemyjob posts here...  So I'd love some professional opinions from y'all.  Do you have any KB software that you use or support that you love/hate/recommend/run screaming from?

Something about going from 12 to 8 front lines techs last week, and knowing it's going to be 6 months before the powers-that-be actually hire and train some new ones for us (during which time, half of those 8 will probably spontaneously combust from the extra workload) has prompted me to try to salvage our pathetic excuse for a KB...

Comments

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

*pimps techsupport_ot...*

Is there a reason why an in-house Wiki won't do the job?

[jecook]

::awards you a pimp hat:: :)

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

No gold coins, but I get da pimp hat! :)

http://www.madblast.com/index.cfm?action=view&id=4671 (http://www.madblast.com/index.cfm?action=view&id=4671)

[sunnylioness.livejournal.com]

Thanks much for the other community... I'll see if I can pry their brains open!

KB has to be both internal and external, nice-n-easy for the L1 techs to add articles, and low-maintenance since I have to admin it between my other tasks, but I don't get to wrest server-side access away from the IT/web/marketing crew to *really* admin it. So I'm shopping WYSIWYG KB in a box. But thanks for the suggestion. Our documentation, KB articles, and various hints & tips are scattered all over the place right now; it's no wonder the techs occasionally do something irreversible (only in our software, I swear...) like apply a back-level hot fix or inadvertently gut a customer's system.

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

I again don't see where Mediawiki goes wrong for you. Only create accounts for posting access and don't allow anon edits, you shouldn't need to really delve into the MySQL backend very much unless there's a real SNAFU. It pretty much runs itself. Admin accounts within MWiki will do everything you need to do without root/shell on any ongoing basis.

Seriously, consider it. If your L1's don't know how to edit Wiki, now's the time to learn. It doesn't get much simpler.

[sunnylioness.livejournal.com]

Thanks again. Some of the guys at the office were tossing the same idea around today too. I'll poke around at the wikis and see if we might be able to coerce them in to doing what we want. Since I'm merely the app admin and conduit to all the other departments, I'll see how the web and publications crew feel about them and see how well we can integrate umpteen different sources of info in to one!

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

We use a Google box. Rather expensive, from what I hear but pretty sweet.

[manuka.livejournal.com]

What scale are we talking about?

We run Numara's Track-IT! for our org, we support about 200-250 users. When I was a student at Park University, a much larger organization, they also used Track-IT!. Generally like the software, has a few quirks, but it works well at the smaller end of the scale where things like Remedy or Siebel are way overkill.

For a really small shop, such as a one-man operation, you could get really creative with GMail/GCal and labels.

[sunnylioness.livejournal.com]

We're a 20-tech desk (8-15 front line and 5-10 L2/L3), taking in about 110 calls a day supporting a small handful of niche applications that vary in age from soon-to-beta vaporware to the software equivilent of a '72 VW Beetle (works great as long as you keep a roll of duct tape and some bailing wire in the trunk at all times).

Problem is we're turning over half of those 20 techs every year (at least), and calls average a 2-3 day close time on the front line an about a month close time when escalated to us. Not to mention that our publications department is currently attempting to whittle down the 1000+ docs that live in the library, dating back to '97... but we still have about 4000 articles in our current KB that cover all the real-life trivia that rarely makes it in to the documentation.

We also have about 50 of our customer contacts who are savvy enough to try to use the customer-facing side of the KB, with dismal results. We'd like to bump that up dramatically someday, but we need to clean it up and make it useful first.

No, really, I love this place sometimes :-p

BTW; Park in KC? I had some friends who went there; I headed west as soon as I could myself.

[manuka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Went to Good ol' PU :) While technically the school is in Parkville, most of my classes were in downtown KCMO. I'm hoping to get a job up in Denver so we can move back. I came out here for a job with Sprint and promptly got laid off. 5 years ago.

[manuka.livejournal.com]

Sounds like Track-IT might be worth a look. It's not free by any stretch (each tech license will run you about $550-$600, less if you're a non-profit like we are), but support is good, and the feature set is good too.

[sunnylioness.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'll add it to the list of ones to look at. The one we're running now cost us in the 5 figures and is crap, so we have a pretty broad range we can work with as far as functionality and price.

[manuka.livejournal.com]

Pop me an e-mail if you want to know more about trackit.

[manuka.livejournal.com]

Hehe... I recall using Peregrine at one job before, and yes, it sucked profusely.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

I *am* the KB for the IT department.

Fear me.



Mostly because I don't have the damn time to document this crap, and LESS time to

Ooops - there goes my damn cell phone.

Seriously - one man shop, trying to make is a two man shop. Non-documentation isn't the "job security" crap, it's just I inhereited none, and it's taking a LONG time to figure out some of it.

[sunnylioness.livejournal.com]

I can understand a fair amount of your conundrum... We weren't exactly a one-man shop any time recently, but Support and Dev used to be practically one & the same, so anything that resided in two people's memories never made it in to a document. And nowadays we tend to hire reps from the industry we support rather then technical folks-- so more time is spent teaching how to ping then teaching how our application works... We're trying (though it feels futile) to get it out of our brains and in to the documentation now, in our infinite spare time.

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to talk my people into replacing the sad excuse for an interactive KB we have (Remedy based) with an internal WIKI. Nobody seems to be biting though... :-(

[jecook]

::watches with interest::

RIght now all we have is a metric fuckton of up-to-date, sort-of up to date, and "holy crap! it hasn't been touched in *5* revisions!!" out of date documentation. Boss has made noises of either enabling the KB "feature" of our intrepid ticketing system, or getting something else entirely.

[sunnylioness.livejournal.com]

Heh... We've gone through two different KBs that are designed specifically to work with our ticketing app. The first was easily integrated but barely useable, and the second is a PITA to auto-populate but is purtier... as long as you don't mind some of its neurotic fits and random crashes. *sigh*

[codecattx.livejournal.com]

We have a "home brewed" KB system that is woefully undocumented.

Last year, the director of support asked for suggestions for a Content/KB Upgrade - I looked at him and said: "Why not set up a Wiki"

He looked at me with blank, uncomprehending cow-like eyes, and said "What's a Wiki?"

There are reasons I don't take sharp, pointy objects to work. But I know that there are several co-workers who are just waiting for the day that they look up to see me chasing portions of Management through the building with a broadsword.

[i-love-eggs.livejournal.com]

http://www.activecampaign.com/kb/ is good....

[anamacha.livejournal.com]

we use a mediaWiki system here, and I'm pretty happy with it ... searching is crap, though -- doesn't respect quotation marks to put words together, can't search on three words, and so on.

http://www.mediawiki.org/