We’ve been really happy with the customer comments and feedback we’ve had about the Lightning Storm Forums. If you’ve been using any of our tools or web parts in an interesting way – please do let us know about it!
One of the features people like in the forums is being able to mark a topic as having been answered. This turns the forums into a real Questions & Answers type area. Once a question has been answered though, as time drifts by it will slowly move down the topic list as more questions are added – sometimes making it hard to find again.
Well, the Lightning Storm Forums now has a solution to create a Knowledge Base repository – this is a feature we are in final testing with so hope to have available to you within the next week or so… Here’s an example of it in use:
1, Someone has asked a question on the forum about best practice for web part deployment:
(click the image for a larger view)
The third reply is a good one, and so we’d like to keep this information in a place that’s easy to access – our Knowledge Base. We can add it to the Knowledge Base by clicking on the highlighted ‘Information’ icon at the top of the above screen shot.
2, Before committing the article to the Knowledge Base we may wish to edit it, so we show all of the topic’s posts in a single text box for you to do just this:
The first reply we had was a bad answer, so we can delete that text – then click on the ‘Add to Knowledge Base’ button at the bottom, and our article is created as a Web Part Page.
3, In the final image below you can see we have made use of the Lightning Conductor Web Part to pull the Knowledge Base articles in and display them just above the forums. This will help your users quickly find commonly asked questions and answers and stop them having to ask questions that have already been answered
Hopefully you like this feature – any feedback or further ideas please leave a comment or drop us an email. Keep an eye on this blog for news of when the new Knowledge Base functionality will be available!
<nick/>
