Build an IT knowledge base people will use

Start with questions, not categories

Not with a structure. An empty knowledge base with twelve categories looks abandoned. Start with the questions you answer most often. In almost every company, they are:

1. Connecting a printer, or a print job that is stuck.
2. Outlook asks for the password or does not synchronise.
3. VPN when working from home.
4. Changing a password and two-factor authentication on a new phone.
5. Camera or microphone in Teams.

If you have a ticketing system, look at the most common categories in Analytics. If not, keep a tally for a week.

What a good article looks like

• A title in the employee’s own words. “Outlook keeps asking for my password”, not “Exchange Online authentication error”.
• One problem per article. Three short articles beat one long one.
• Numbered steps. One action per step.
• A screenshot at the tricky point. Not for every step.
• What to do if it does not help. The last sentence points to the way to reach IT.

Title: [problem in the employee's words]
Applies to: [application, version or location]

Steps
1. [First action]
2. [Second action, with an image if useful]
3. [Third action]

Still not working?
Contact IT at [portal link] and tell us which step failed.

Last checked: [date], [owner]

Write for people outside IT

Write it the way you would explain it over the phone. Name buttons exactly as they appear on screen, in quotation marks. Leave out explanations of why something works the way it does, unless they help next time. If you need a technical term, explain it once in a short phrase.

A good test: give the article to someone in sales and watch without helping. Wherever they hesitate, a sentence or a screenshot is missing.

Maintain it as you go, not as a project

A knowledge base will not be finished in a month. It grows bit by bit from your tickets. The simplest rule: when you write the same answer for the third time, it becomes an article. Copy your reply from the ticket, take out the names, number the steps, and you are done.

• A ticket shows that an article is wrong: correct it straight away.
• An application changes: find the articles that mention it.
• Once a year: review the ten most-read articles and delete the ones nobody reads.

Help people find articles

The best guide does not help if nobody finds it. Link articles in your replies instead of rewriting the steps every time. Show the most-read ones on the portal’s start page. And the most effective of all: show matching articles at the moment someone is about to report an issue.

Categories for the knowledge base

Once you have more than twenty articles, categories help. Use the same ones as for your tickets, so the two fit together and the help when reporting an issue finds the right article more easily. Hardly any company needs more than eight categories. Search matters more than order: someone with a problem searches in their own words and does not click through folders.

Internal documentation for IT

Besides the guides for everyone, IT needs documentation of its own: how to restart the server, where the licence keys are, who to call at the phone provider. Keep it separate, with different permissions, and write it so that your holiday cover can understand it. Passwords do not belong in it. Put them in a password manager.

How to tell whether it helps

• How often are articles read? The most-read ones show where the need is.
• Does the number of tickets on a topic fall once there is an article for it?
• How often do you link articles in replies? If rarely, they are too long or too hard to find.
• Are there articles nobody ever reads? Delete or rename them.

Do not expect miracles. A knowledge base does not replace IT; it takes the same old questions off its plate. If that leaves more time for the difficult ones, it has done its job.

An example article

Applies to: Windows 11, Outlook for Microsoft 365

1. Close Outlook.
2. Open Start, search for “Systemsteuerung” (Control Panel).
3. Look for “Mail” at the top right and open it.
4. Select “Profile anzeigen” (Show Profiles), then
   “Hinzufügen” (Add), and enter a profile name.
5. Enter your work email address and sign in with Microsoft.
6. Select the new profile as the default and start Outlook.

Still not working? Contact IT through the portal and tell
us which step you got stuck on.

The example assumes a German-language Windows desktop, so the on-screen labels are shown in German with a translation. The steps are only an example and may differ between versions. Try them on one of your own devices before you publish them.

How much time it takes

An article from a resolved ticket takes about ten minutes: copy the answer, take out the names, number the steps, add a screenshot. Five articles are an afternoon. If each of them heads off three tickets a month, the afternoon pays for itself within a few weeks. These figures are estimates, so work with your own.

Turn resolved tickets into articles

A knowledge base grows most easily when a resolved answer quickly becomes an article. In 404desk, you take a ticket solution over as a draft and paste screenshots with Ctrl+V. Once the article has been reviewed and published to the portal, the help shown before someone submits a ticket suggests it, before the next identical ticket is created. See the knowledge base feature.