Why you should move to online knowledge base software

Pete Grigg | June 5, 2014

In almost every company that I have worked for in the past, there was always a collection of documents and forms in various degrees of disarray that were stored in some dark corner of the office or in some folder on a shared drive 8 levels deep. It was almost as if the company didn’t actually want us to be able to find anything on our own. This, of course, was unintentional but it begs the question: is there a better way?

When In Doubt Look to the Internet

If you read the title of this article, you probably already guessed that I believe the answer is a resounding yes! I am going to highlight a few of the reasons why I believe that an online knowledge base solution is a huge improvement over traditional methods but there are many reasons to make the move.

One Location to Rule Them All

The importance of having everything in one place cannot be overstated. If something is hard to find, most people will simply stop looking for it. By using an online knowledge base to manage all of your documents not only will everything be in one place, everything will be in one place and it will be easily accessible through an internet browser.

Technology Is Awesome Until It Isn’t

Shared drives can be great when you need to move large amounts of data securely between employees but they can also be tricky to set up correctly, not to mention extremely frustrating to employees if the connection process if overly complex. As mentioned above, I’ve worked at companies that used them as repositories for documents and forms and frankly it just didn’t work well. The problems varied but the most prevalent I saw were the following:

1. Documents were outdated or several versions of the document existed which caused confusion.

2. The naming convention for the folders was super confusing and hard to navigate.

3. It was so rare that you needed to connect to the drive that you would forget how to do it by the time you needed it again.

Moving to an online knowledge base solution solves all of these problems.

1. When your documents are hosted online, the current version is the only one your employees see and it’s very easy to keep up to date.

2. A smart/learning online search and an easy to navigate table of contents replaces folders altogether.

3. If your employees forget how to use an internet browser you may have bigger issues than your knowledge base.

Make Updates Anytime From Anywhere

Another huge benefit of moving your knowledge base documents online is that you are always only an internet connection away from accessing and updating them. There is no more worry that you aren’t connected to your work intranet or that the document you want to update is on your work computer and not on your home computer. You can simply update the article or download the document make an update and re-upload it.

The Decision to Move

Change can be a pain especially when you are talking about moving to an entirely different technology, but in this case I believe it is totally worth it. Although the initial move can take a bit of time, once you make the move your knowledge base, your documents, and your forms become so much easier to find and maintain.

{{snippet.PeteGrigg}}

{{snippet.Disqus}}