Creating an internal knowledge base is an important step for any organization looking to improve their efficiency and productivity. An internal knowledge base is a collection of information that is accessible to all employees, allowing them to quickly and easily find the what they need to do their jobs. By having a centralized source of information, organizations can reduce the amount of time spent searching for the data and increase the accuracy of the information they find. In this post, we'll discuss the benefits of creating an internal knowledge base and the steps you can take to get started.
What is Internal Knowledge Base?
Let's start from the basics, what actually an internal knowledge base is? An internal knowledge base is a collection of information that is accessible to a company's employees. It is a repository of information that is used to help employees find answers to their questions and to help them do their jobs more efficiently.
Speaking from experience, such a solution is vital, if you're tired of tons of email, scattered files or looking through multiple attachments in your drive.
Perfect Wiki may serve as an example of an internal knowledge base, as this solution integrates into your Microsoft Teams environment seamlessly, allowing to set the database accessible only for your team.
In this blog post we'll dwell upon the topic of an internal knowledge base creation, usage and functionalities and will illustrate the narrative with the example of a knowledge base solution - Perfect Wiki, the solution that helped to structure a documentation library and get rid of multiple workspaces at work.
Where Can a Company Create an Internal Knowledge Base?
A company can create an internal knowledge base on their own website or on a third-party platform. Choosing a platform can be a real struggle for business owners or team leaders, as the market right now is overloaded with the offers. That's great as there're solutions for every budget, team size and purpose
So, why opting for Perfect Wiki and using it as an example? Perfect Wiki is a cloud-based platform that allows companies to create their own internal knowledge base. It is easy to use and provides a secure environment for storing and sharing information. Moreover, Perfect Wiki integrates into your Office 365 & Microsoft Teams environment or can be used standalone. Another perk is a mobile app with editing functionality, if you need your team to work out of office using their tablet or smartphone.
How to Structure Internal Knowledge Base?
Choosing a solution is only the beginning of the journey. After that you have to dedicate some time and energy to structuring and collecting all the scattered data to give it some form and logic.
When creating an internal knowledge base, it is important to structure the information in a way that is easy to navigate and understand. Perfect Wiki allows companies to create a hierarchical structure for their knowledge base by just dragging and dropping files. This structure can be customized to fit the needs of the company and can be used to organize information into categories and subcategories.
Also, the abundance of templates available in Perfect Wiki together with the tagging functionality offer you a clear-cut structure for any sort of data you're to store in your internal knowledge base, allowing your colleagues to navigate through the knowledge base easily. That makes the process of filling in the content so easy, as the drafts are already containing table of contents, paragraphs and visual means.
How to Create an Internal Knowledge Base For Cost-Effectively?
Here comes on of the main stumbling blocks: the price. Even large businesses aren't always ready to give up thousands dollars for a solution they're not even familiar with. They usually want to start small or just need a knowledge base for a certain department or group.
Here, Perfect Wiki again matched our requirements. Creating an internal knowledge base for a reasonable price is a great way to ensure that your team has access to the information they need to do their jobs effectively, thus Perfect Wiki offers a 14 days free trial version, to make sure the product fits the needs.
How to Encourage Internal Knowledge Sharing?
Collaborative workflow is one of the main goals of using internal knowledge bases. Its's like creating a space for your team to be always connected and have all the needed materials and information at hand. For our team, as for many others out there the aim was - to be able to share ideas, files, links without switching workspaces, using third party applications and looking through numerous folders.
As we've discussed, encouraging internal knowledge sharing is an important part of creating an effective internal knowledge base. For our team Perfect Wiki provides tools that make it easy to share information with other employees. It also allows employees to comment on and discuss information, which can help to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Perfect Wiki sharing dialogue offer several options, so that each employee can get the information in the convenient way.
The comment section in the application just adds to the collaborative process and flexibility of opinion exchange.
How to Create Internal Knowledge Hub?
Concluding our guide, let's focus one more time on the steps you can follow when turning your scattered files collection into a real internal knowledge hub that enables data accessibility for your team members.
An internal knowledge hub is a centralized storage of information and resources. It is designed to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and expertise within the organization, and to provide a platform for collaboration and innovation. It can include a variety of content, such as documents, videos, webinars, and other resources.
To create your Internal knowledge hub you have to follow some guidelines:
1. Identify the purpose of the knowledge hub: What kind of information do you want to share? What kind of resources do you want to make available?
2. Choose the right platform: There are many different platforms available, such as Perfect Wiki, SharePoint, Confluence, or Notion.
3. Create content: This could include articles, videos, tutorials, and other resources.
4. Invite users: This could be done through email, social media, or other methods.
5. Monitor usage: This could include tracking page views, downloads, and other metrics.
6. Update content: This could include adding new articles, videos, and other resources.
By creating an internal knowledge hub, organizations can ensure that their employees have access to the most current information and resources, which can help them to be more productive and efficient.
Perfect Wiki, as an example discussed, provides a set of features and functionalities that allow companies to create a knowledge hub and keep their data up-to-date and employees in the know, create custom categories and subcategories to organize the information in a way that is easy to navigate.
In Perfect Wiki you can upload any type of content in no time, using photos, videos and attaching media.
Managing your information about your team and tracking the changes is also a piece of pie in Perfect Wiki. Every month the admin gets the report of user activity, most viewed pages and other info valuable to assess the efficiency of you internal knowledge hub.
Here we demonstrated you the functionalities and advantages of creating an internal knowledge base for your team, if you still haven't done that. There're solutions for any taste and preference, however, after studying numerous of them - we recommend trying Perfect Wiki, a feature rich and user friendly solution integrated into your Microsoft Teams workspace.