We receive daily emails of visitors and people requesting help on a topic or another, looking for a script, a website, a link, an idea or absolutely anything, even that our website is mainly for news and articles publishing, we spend lot of time per day reading and answering emails one by one. But sometimes it become boring and more tiring to repeat the same thing, the same answers. So what if our service was a hosting provider, or software developer, I can imagine this number of questions increasing indefinitely to become a serious problem especially if you didn’t choose the right solution and tools since the beginning. ActiveKB can be an excellent solution here and provide an online knowledge base for professionals to manage all the questions and answers with the highest efficiency.
This is not the first time that I met an Interspire product, and I can say that I love the way that they conceive their web solutions, especially Article Live and Send Studio. ActiveKB was built in the same spirit, complete, professional and very easy to use, and I have to mention that it is a “veteran” in the knowledge base arena. The first version was released about 3 years ago, and since then countless product updates and features have been added which a large majority requested by customers. Today the product is mature and have profited enough from user experience, thing that you can feel in the application administration panel, and the look and feel of the application.
I faced few issues with the installation getting files with the wrong permissions, so I written a quick fix that you can find here. In case you had the same problem here is the way to go.
After installation, the control panel is very complete to manage your knowledge database from categories, questions and answers with the ability to upload questions from a csv file. With every question you can detect related questions or select them manually, add keywords and description or finally attach a document.
Best of all is the groups and users management, that can transform your knowledge database in a complete support system. First you can create groups with the specified permissions and the category the gain access on, you can also check if the group can be contacted or no. The permission system is very flexible so you can add groups with template permissions only, or just to make backups, or manage comments or glossary … Then you can add new users with the permissions you want by putting them in the right groups.
ActiveKB come with three themes pre-installed, that you can personalize with the look and feel of your website easily. But I find the creation of new themes a little difficult here with 113 html template and 2 css files for the default themes, better I recommend you to use the default which is the favorite one for me and change the stylesheets and images only.
Finally ActiveKB supports comments and provide also a complete glossary management tool. The statistics will help you to monitor the activity of your support section with the most requested question, popular categories, most discussed, Popular and failed searches … etc. A Complete knowledge base solution that could definitely boost your productivity and give satisfaction to your customers.
You can see in action our support section powered by ActiveKB.
