Is SharePoint a Great Knowledge Base Tool? Some Pros and Cons

by IDS Logic Pvt. Ltd. Software Outsourcing Company

There is no denying the fact that selecting the best knowledge base software isn’t an easy task. With so many software available in the market, it can be difficult to narrow down the best that fit for your organization. While selecting your knowledge base software, you need to be sure that it is fully functional, cost effective and easy to navigate.

Now, if you have already started your hunt, then you must have considered checking Microsoft SharePoint development also. Here, in this article we will discuss the pros and cons of SharePoint knowledge management software.

What is KNOWLEDGE BASE and KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT?

Knowledge base is the digital asset that helps to automate the customer support tasks and allows the customers to self-serve. Typically, it needs no human intervention for most base queries and it can be either internal or external, which is aimed at end users, internal staff or developers. The internal team can be your customers also who are self-serving.

Knowledge management refers to the sharing and storing of information or knowledge within an organisation, which helps to improve the productivity of the business. It can be said that SharePoint is a great knowledge management tool instead of a knowledge base software. This means it performs well as a collaboration and knowledge sharing, but may not be the best tool suitable for a knowledge base.

Some benefits of choosing SharePoint knowledge base:

Easy to on board for Microsoft users:

Your staff members may already know how to use SharePoint or they are at least used to Microsoft Office suite. So, you can keep the knowledge base also in the same system that your staffs are using and this will help in reducing the on boarding time to a great extent. The knowledge base administrators won’t need new accounts and they don’t have to worry about passwords.

SharePoint as a knowledge wiki:

SharePoint is always the best for any internal collaboration and also for your knowledge management strategy. It makes it easy to keep the company information at one place which is easily accessible across the distributed team and allows people to work together better. This internal knowledge base is like a wiki, which means that anyone can add the content to access the CMS.

Secure and reliable:

Microsoft is the most trusted tool that has gained much popularity among enterprises globally and so you can be free from all the worries that are related to data protection, hacking or cybercrimes. With frequent updates, SharePoint also brings in the latest features that make the software all the more secure and reliable.

Some cons of using SharePoint knowledge base:

Non indexed contents:

If you have hosted your documents in SharePoint knowledge base and in a variety of formats that includes PowerPoint slides. Excel spreadsheets, word docs and PDF, then these won’t be indexable. Search queries are in fact difficult and you won’t be able to browse the content or find exactly what you need. This often limits the search capabilities.

Restricted number of users:

A knowledge base always should have the potential of having unlimited number of users who are customers. Most self-service knowledge base needs a login, which makes it difficult to handle. If your knowledge base needs a login, then it would be difficult for you to scale your knowledge base quickly and add more used. And if you make it public facing, then the approval workflows and scheduling will not be available.

Lacks version control:

If you want to have a version control or scheduling, publishing permissions, collaboration within SharePoint, then it won’t be possible and this makes it difficult to have a proper editing process thereby reducing the team productivity.

No information architecture:

It is very important to have a proper information architecture, else your users will hit the knowledge base and they will be overwhelmed by the unstructured information. You won’t be able to categorise the content in SharePoint. Having content that is unstructured means that your knowledge base would be worse to use.

Summary

Microsoft SharePoint is a great product for the internal collaboration. Though it is used as a knowledge base software by many organizations, it lacks several features. It is best used as a knowledge management software. 

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Created on Nov 28th 2019 23:37. Viewed 376 times.

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