Microsoft reported that by 2016, 78% of the Fortune 500 companies had started using SharePoint to meet their content management needs. One in every five knowledge workers has access to SharePoint.
You need an effective Sharepoint knowledge management process if you plan to include internal and version-controlled tools for your organization.
As Albert Einstein said, “Information is not Knowledge,” and this statement becomes more accurate as organizations grow in size. Let’s find out how capable SharePoint is as a knowledge management platform.
Table of Content
Can Microsoft SharePoint be Used as a Knowledge Base?
Yes, Microsoft SharePoint can be used as a Knowledge Base because it stores and organizes information in a centralized location. SharePoint is also a good choice as a knowledge base due to its powerful search features and adaptable customization possibilities.
Additionally, SharePoint’s collaboration and teamwork features allow multiple users to contribute to and maintain the knowledge base, making it a centralized file repository of information. Now that we know that SharePoint can be used as a Knowledge Base. Let us look at the 5 best practices for using SharePoint as your entire Knowledge Base.
Use Tags
For 19 years since its initial launch in 2001, companies have widely used SharePoint to collect, develop, share, and manage expertise in the organizational knowledge base.
The sheer amount of information security makes it impossible to find the correct data quickly. In SharePoint, you can use enterprise metadata management to label information and make the look-up time shorter.
As you keep adding new information, the tags will ensure that everything is properly labeled and organized in the working environment.
Collaborate, Collaborate, and Collaborate
SharePoint is not only a doc repository but a collaborative platform. It can get used in sharing tacit knowledge of the experts and IT professionals.
The knowledge workers can meet up virtually and add data, comments, share expert advice or suggestions to any doc they are working on in SharePoint.
Ease of collaboration is quite essential for any company to ensure the growth of not only the organization but its staff members as well. You can set permissions on who can edit, view, or comment, make it available to everyone in the enterprise, or share it only with specific people.
If you are looking for ways to increase collaboration, you can refer to a blog on increasing team collaboration. You will learn 10 proven strategies for better collaboration in your organization.
With all of these valuable knowledge management portal functionalities, you have no reason to exclude cooperation in your software development company.
Inculcate AAR
After Action Review (AAR), initially developed by the US Army, is an easy process to execute in Microsoft SharePoint. AARs are reviews done by experts on their actions and help employees make better decision-making capabilities.
After completing the task or a document, experts give their feedback on what was done, why a particular action was taken over other steps, how a different potential approach can provide a dynamic customization result, what security parameters are given, and other things.
From this tacit knowledge, teams can learn better and make more informed choices. You can have a common ground where anyone can ask questions, and those questions can be answered by the right people using essential conversations.
Assign permissions
When using SharePoint, you will have all your knowledge workers from sales, marketing, development, HR team, etc., working with an intuitive knowledge base software.
You don’t want the Sales team SOP to be accessible by the HR team and vice versa. So assigning permissions on each doc is a very crucial thing to do and is used for various taxonomies of validation purposes.
But if your company has more than ten team members, and if a new member joins the marketing team, the last thing you want to do is add the person to every document taxonomy related to marketing. It could take hours. It is worse than someone quitting the team.
Instead, you can assign the permissions to a group, and then you need to add/remove only once from the group.
Information Architecture
The next tip for you while using SharePoint is to set up an information architecture for your site environment. A site’s information and navigation architecture determine how the site is set up in pages, modules, a document library, and much more.
You can have a hierarchical list of site contents, keywords, tags, data types, etc. With SharePoint, content classification can be done in the form of specific Libraries and Lists created by the end-users according to their needs.
You want to address the primary goal you want to achieve by using SharePoint Knowledge Base and what types of articles you will include in fulfilling those goals. After you have a clear idea of this, you will quickly determine your SharePoint knowledge base’s best layout.
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Advantages of SharePoint Knowledge Management Solution
Having discussed the best practices in SharePoint Knowledge management software, the next thing you need to consider are the advantages and shortcomings of having a knowledge base on SharePoint.
Working together, SharePoint and knowledge management are complementary to each other. First, let’s look at the benefits of Knowledge Management using SharePoint:
Effortless Onboarding for Microsoft Users
Almost 95% of your staff is likely to have used Microsoft Office 365 Suite applications. With the very high popularity of Microsoft Applications, use software for knowledge management solutions from the same suite that your staff use for their day to day tasks in the field.
This reduces onboarding efforts, and the admin department does not have to keep track of many passwords for security importance.
One System for all Your Needs
Another advantage of using a Microsoft Office 365 application is that Microsoft has various applications to meet your organizational needs.
Microsoft Outlook possesses a great potential to manage your calendar and email inbox. Word is perfect for writing any doc, and Excel can help you with managing your finances.
Powerpoint, Onenote, Access, and Skype can help keep all your activities streamlined into one suite experience that solves all your requirements.
In addition to that, SharePoint knowledge management is multi-functional. You can use it as your organization’s file system, knowledge repository, knowledge sharing, knowledge management solution, document management system, knowledge assets, document collaboration platform, and much more.
You can use SharePoint to write business systems, content classification or creation of a web part and company, and knowledge base platform.
SharePoint is your Organization’s Wikipedia
Once you start using the SharePoint knowledge management system, you will realize that all your data is stored in one place. Searching for content is as simple as doing a wiki search with this knowledge enterprise.
Simply type a few terms in the search bar, and all relevant content, a web part of documents can be found in a couple of seconds. Anyone can add content types and access content of the knowledge base system.
Teamwork & Collaboration
SharePoint facilitates collaboration and teamwork by allowing users to work on documents and projects in real-time, regardless of location. It allows team members to share ideas, provide feedback, and make changes to documents and projects in a collaborative environment.
This also allows for creating workspaces where teams can share files, documents, and other information related to specific projects or tasks. Additionally, SharePoint allows for version control, so team members can track changes made to documents and projects and revert to previous versions if necessary. This helps to ensure that all team members are working on the most up-to-date version of a document or project.
Better Security
Organizations can restrict access to information and safeguard sensitive data using the security capabilities built into SharePoint. Permission must be created for authorized users to access certain information. Thus, the company is better able to protect the privacy of critical information.
It also enables multi-factor authentication, which adds a layer of protection by asking users to give extra authentication factors, like a fingerprint scan or a one-time code delivered to a mobile device.
Additionally, SharePoint gives users the option for data encryption and secure connection using HTTPS, ensuring that all information transported between the user’s device and SharePoint is encrypted and cannot be intercepted by unauthorized parties.
Limitations of SharePoint Knowledge Management Solution
Limited Search Capabilities
Even though the Sharepoint Knowledge Management system has a search feature, there are limitations associated with the search functionality. With SharePoint, your content isn’t indexed.
Search is limited to the site collection your user or individual is searching on, and you cannot filter the search results by any parameter other than the age of the content.
The search feature is useful for looking up a small number of files with a general query of parameters. For larger sizes of data taxonomies with advanced parameters, the search results are inefficient.
Want another suitable option? Contact CloudTutorial. To make your customers, employees, and team members’ search easy and convenient, CloudTutorial has provided categories and sub-categories options in its knowledge sharing system.
With sub-categories, users can easily explore different information and get what they are looking for on the website.
Unstructured Content
SharePoint’s information structure is similar to Wikipedia’s information architecture: it isn’t organized and indexed in a user-friendly manner.
A large number of unstructured content processes can be overwhelming for end-users and teams. Ideally, your content should be well organized into appropriate topics so that it is easy to search queries for information.
The content classification and structuring in SharePoint needs a lot of footwork.
Restricted Number of Users
This feature can be a severe issue for organizations trying to make their Sharepoint internal knowledge base platform public. Most of the self-serving knowledge-based platforms should not require users to log in to look up some information.
This is a big hassle for your customer journey and their security, who do not want to spend more than a minute looking for the data.
So if you want someone to look at the contents of your knowledge base, and that person does not happen to be a member of your company, this won’t be an easy task.
These are some of the advantages and disadvantages of SharePoint that, in our opinion, can affect its ability to be a knowledge management platform. While SharePoint is just perfect, typically based on the user’s experience, it fails to meet others’ needs.
If your Knowledge Management capabilities are intended for external use, like the Knowledge management platform of RStudio, then knowledge base SharePoint might not be the best platform for your needs.
On the other hand, if you want knowledge management solutions for your employees or for a specific user, and there is a lot of document collaboration going on, then SharePoint might be the right choice.
Setup & Maintenance Complexity
Setting up and maintaining SharePoint can be challenging for organizations with minimal IT resources. The initial setup of SharePoint can be time-consuming and requires technical expertise to set up and configure.
Once the setup is done, ongoing maintenance, including software updates, backups, and troubleshooting, is also necessary. SharePoint also requires ongoing content management, such as creating and managing libraries and lists, metadata, and compliance monitoring.
Insufficient Mobile Support
Due to SharePoint’s poor mobile compatibility, users find accessing information when on the road challenging. There is a mobile app for SharePoint available for iOS and Android. However, it may have fewer basic features and capabilities than the full desktop version. As a result, users may not have access to all the features and functionality available on the desktop version of the website when using the app.
Additionally, some content categories, including web pages or intricate forms, might not be able to be displayed by the mobile app. Furthermore, offline accessibility may not be enabled, and the mobile app will require an internet connection to access the information.
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FAQsConclusionMicrosoft SharePoint is a cloud-based collaborative platform that allows companies and teams to gather their organization’s collective knowledge in one platform. It has flawless integration with Microsoft Office 365 applications, content management, and document storage systems.
SharePoint is highly configurable and can get used in various ways in different organizations. It allows taxonomists, librarians, and administrators to create and manage a set of terms across the enterprise.
SharePoint has many useful features, but at the same time, a lot of shortcomings like challenging navigation for the average customer or user experience, the overall cost, and subscription, which makes it difficult to see if it is the perfect KMS for your organization.
If your primary goal is managing a doc, then using SharePoint to control your organizational knowledge is the right choice. SharePoint is suitable for the automation of business processes, especially for companies that are already subscribed to SharePoint.
Knowledge management solutions identify knowledge gaps during content creation and refer unanswered customer issues and questions to experts who can respond to customer queries by adding new information back into the system.
Although there are many, some of the top open-source knowledge management solutions include Documize and phpMyFAQ. In this blog, you can read more about best knowledge base open source software.
Organizations need to integrate the platform with data classification tools that extend the out-of-the-box capabilities of SharePoint with better search functionality, a correct information architecture, taxonomy, and term management. It will turn SharePoint into an effective knowledge management solution.
After reading this blog, we hope that you have gained a more concrete understanding of SharePoint and Knowledge Management solutions. With SharePoint, document collaboration, security, and content classification are easy.
You can work with other staff on creating perfect documents and enhance business productivity to a great extent.
With the help of SharePoint, you will be able to create well-defined business processes. If you have any questions related to knowledge base for your business, contact us at CloudTutorial, and we will be happy to hear from you.
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