How Many SupportWizard KnowledgeBases Should I Use?

One of the first decisions you need to make is how many SupportWizard knowledgebases, you want to use.

In SupportWizard terminology, a "knowledgebase" is a single set of database tables, including user tables, ticket tables, and all customization. You may use a single SupportWizard knowledgebase to support more than one company product.

There are several points to consider when deciding how many knowledgebases to use. If you are supporting a small number of products or product lines, and they are very distinct, requiring different kinds of fields, different support reps, and so on, you may want to create a SupportWizard knowledgebase for each major product or line. If, on the other hand, you have a large number of products that are very similar, you may choose to group them into one or more SupportWizard knowledgebases.

If you are using SupportWizard for knowledgebase management and if your knowledgebases are quite involved and distinct, you may want a SupportWizard knowledgebase for each knowledgebase you are managing, or you may be able to manage multiple knowledgebases within a single SupportWizard knowledgebase.

Advantages of separate knowledgebases for tracking multiple products, knowledgebases, or activities

• Each SupportWizard knowledgebase can have fields that relate specifically to the knowledgebase it is supporting.

• Each SupportWizard knowledgebase has different registered users and groups.

• Each SupportWizard knowledgebase can have a different look and feel, with different product logos, graphics, fonts, and footnotes.

• You can create separate hyperlinks from your web page that take the user to the SupportWizard knowledgebase that is of precise interest.

• Each SupportWizard knowledgebase will have its own set of FAQs available through the FAQ interface.

• If you are supporting a very large numbers of users, each knowledgebase can be placed, if necessary, on a different server, improving speed.

Reasons to combine multiple product or knowledgebase support in one SupportWizard Project

• If your products or knowledgebases are closely related so that information that is relevant to one is also relevant to another, you may wish to have all information in one SupportWizard knowledgebase.

• If you want all users who visit your site to be able to self-register just once to access all information you choose to make available through SupportWizard, then it is best to place all that information in one SupportWizard knowledgebase, since each SupportWizard knowledgebase has its own user table.

You can export and import user records from one knowledgebase to another at regular intervals. You can also use LDAP or Windows Active Directory Service as your user authentication for all SupportWizard knowledgebases.

• If you want to provide similar kinds of information for many products, such as software downloads or patches, you might put all of these materials together in one SupportWizard knowledgebase.

• Economy - the pricing for SupportWizard is based on the number of knowledgebases.

If you are using SupportWizard to share information that is not related to specific products, the nature of the information will suggest the number of knowledgebases needed. For instance, you could use a single SupportWizard knowledgebase to collect resume and applicant information for several job openings at your company. Since you can control which fields particular user groups see, you can make different fields visible to different users. You can thus have a different group and automatic login for each job opening that will display only fields related to that job.

A single knowledgebase can be segmented using group permissions so that different groups of users will see different subsets of tickets, different fields, and so on, so it is quite possible to use a single knowledgebase to accomplish varied tracking tasks.