Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

On the 15^th July 2009 myself and Mike where lucky enough to be asked to speak at the Learning gateway conference at the Belfry my session was titled “Other Components you can use” a very uninspiring title which came about from a conversation with Richard Willis but which turned out to be a very lively and well attended session.

 So what I thought what I would do is cover through this blog 2 of the topics that I spoke about that day knowledge base and media delivery. This post will cover the knowledge base topic and then I will go into detail of how we achieved more than 4000 videos online delivered all through our SharePoint learning gateway.

There are on the market many knowledge base solutions for SharePoint including offerings from Bamboo Solutions and also one of the fantastic forty templates available for download from the wsdemo website  

The approach we took was to ask if we needed a fully-fledged helpdesk solution or a component of it we quickly came to the conclusion that the issuing of helpdesk tickets for user incidents and tracking of resolutions was not needed, we have in the past tried other helpdesk solutions but with the rapid turnaround of problems and resolutions within a school IT support department the only element we did need was the knowledge base.  The obvious solution for us was to use a wiki to deliver this.

One of the weakest areas we have in our IT support department (and many others I would guess) is documentation so by combining the use of wikis and the power of the search capabilities of SharePoint it was the obvious solution even Dan Rolles one of our IT technicians took to it like a fish to water writing up a lot of the posts that you can see in the screenshot above. So we ended up with a searchable resource covering topics ranging from setting up an iMac with tiger through to NLB for our SharePoint farm. I am a great believer in the KISS concept ‘Keep It Simple $#UP*#’ and not over engineering a solution.

Dave